What a wedding website actually costs in the UK

There are three price points for a wedding website in the UK and they are not really competing with each other. Working out which one you are shopping in takes about two minutes, and it will save you a fortnight of comparing things that are not comparable.

Free

Joy, The Knot, Bridebook, Hitched and Zola all give you a wedding website for nothing. You pick a template, fill it in yourself, and get a page with your details, an RSVP form and links to your gift registry. A custom domain usually costs extra. That is genuinely the whole model, and it works: for a lot of couples, a free site is the correct answer and anyone telling you otherwise is selling something.

What you are paying with is time and patience. The reviews across these platforms are consistent about what goes wrong: things not saving, RSVPs going missing, support that turns out to be an email address answered by a bot. Joy currently sits at 1.8 out of 5 on Trustpilot across more than a hundred reviews, and the complaints are almost entirely about the tool rather than the design.

Use a free one if: you need an address, a date, an RSVP form and a registry link, and you have a spare Sunday.

£6 to £40, templates

Search Etsy for a wedding website and you get over a thousand results between about £6 and £40. Almost all of them are Canva files or instant-download templates that you then build yourself. There are a small number of genuinely bespoke listings around the £190 mark, but they are the exception.

This tier exists because it looks like a shortcut. It usually is not. You are still the one doing the building, you have just paid £20 for a nicer starting point than the free tools give you.

Use a template if: you enjoy this sort of thing and you want it to look better than the free templates allow.

£400 to £1,000, built for you

At this level somebody else does it. You send your details, they send back a finished site. UK examples run from around £397 for a done-for-you wedding website through to £985 for one designed to match a bespoke stationery suite.

What varies enormously in this bracket is scope. Most of it is still a website: your story, an RSVP form, a countdown, maybe a photo upload. A smaller number include the things that matter on the actual day, which is where the price difference usually sits:

• a running order your guests can follow, that updates when the day slips
• a seating plan guests look up themselves rather than crowding round a board
• music requests you approve
• a photo wall that fills up during the day rather than a week later

Use a done-for-you build if: the planning has already eaten more evenings than you expected, or the day itself has enough moving parts that “everyone just asks us” has stopped being a plan.

Putting the number in context

The average UK wedding in 2026 costs around £22,000, which works out at roughly £272 per guest. Bridebook’s 2026 figures put average spend on stationery alone at £378, and a bespoke printed invitation suite for a hundred guests regularly runs past £1,500. The average couple who overspends does so by about £4,800.

So a £500 wedding site is between one and two guests’ worth of catering. That is not an argument that you should buy one. It is context, because the number feels much larger in isolation than it does next to the rest of the budget, and most couples judge it against the £20 Etsy template rather than against the £378 they are about to spend on paper.

The honest test

Ask one question: in the fortnight before the wedding, who is answering the guest questions?

If the answer is “nobody, we’ve sent a good info pack and people will cope”, a free site is fine. If the answer is you, your mum, or a friend who has been quietly turned into an unpaid coordinator, then you are already paying for this. Just not in money.