When Kendall and I were planning our wedding in 2010, we wanted to provide our friends and family a website to visit where they could find the wedding schedule, maps, photos, and our registration. We were looking for a website that was simple and elegant. It needed to offer basic features like an RSVP form, and we had to be able to update it easily as plans for the event changed.
At the time, the options were pretty limited, so Kendall ended up creating something from scratch. It was beautiful and perfectly matched our wedding’s aesthetic, but the process opened our eyes to how difficult making a wedding website could be for someone outside the web development world.
Thankfully, over the following years, all that has changed and there are now a variety of wonderful ways to create wedding websites and hundreds of beautiful templates to choose from. In this article, we are going to work through how to make a wedding website with WordPress using one of the beautiful WordPress themes in the collection below. You should have a fully functional website up and running in 15-20 minutes, and I promise that this will be the easiest part of preparing for your special day.
Choosing a Name
The first step in setting up any website is choosing a domain where you site will be visible to the public. Many wedding websites are at domains like “hernameandhisname.com.” For example, ours was kendallandevan.com.
Don’t feel like this is a hard and fast rule. You can get as creative as you want. We’ve also see lots of wonderful domains and names for wedding websites that are whimsical, sweet, and have nothing to do with the names of the bride and groom. If you’re a creative person there’s no limit to the possibilities.
Choosing a WordPress Theme For Your Wedding Website
Here’s where it gets really fun. There are thousands of WordPress themes all over the web that you can choose from when setting up your website. You’ll want to look for features like an easy to navigate setup process and a beautiful design that matches the aesthetic of your wedding event. If you’re planning to collect rsvp responses via the website you should make sure the theme comes with a built-in RSVP form that notifies you by email. Additionally, you may wish to look for features that assist with your gift registry and event mapping. This website can be the central hub where your guests go to stay current on your wedding plans. I’ve collected our very favorites wedding themes here for you to review:
My Wedding
My Wedding is a beautiful, flexible, WordPress theme for weddings that provides all the features you will need to create and maintain your wedding website. Choose colors to match your wedding using the feature rich theme options panel and reconfigure the frontpage rows using a drag and drop organizer. This is the perfect wedding theme for the modern wedding, so be sure to check it out.
It offers the powerful theme options panel included with all of the Nimbus Themes. Choose from hundreds of google fonts and an unlimited number of color options allowing you to perfectly match your wedding website to the colors and theme of your wedding. If you are interested in seeing examples of this theme in action, just jump over to the theme info page here and peruse the great showcase of theme users.
Honeymoon
Honeymoon is a beautiful, parallax WordPress theme that uses big, high-impact images to put you and your partner front and center. Choose from a huge number of Google fonts and color options to match your website to your other wedding materials. This theme comes with an RSVP form and a collection of plugins to enhance your website. It also offers a guestbook feature adding an additional value that many themes don’t include in there native offerings.
The creators of the Honeymoon theme stress the quality of there code and conformity to best coding practices. These are increasingly important features as the rate of hacking had increased in the recent months and sloppy or insecure code is most often the culprit. Additionally, they point to the speed at which this theme loads pages out-of-the-box. Page load times is more important than ever as Google increasingly relies on page load speed to prioritize listings in the SERPs.
Just Married
The Just Married theme is a fast-to-deploy, and easy-to-use WordPress theme from the folks over at Theme Fuse, it comes with a collection of great layouts and customization options. The benefits of this theme include a built-in RSVP form and fast to deploy registration page so your attendees, family and friends can quickly find your registry items.
The theme design is reminiscent of a card layout, meaning that it looks a little like a wedding invitation card. I think this would be an odd design for almost any other application but in this case it seems pretty appropriate and I think it works well. The theme options panel offers you the ability to quickly switch between several pre-built styles and to set a custom background images so you can style the website to fit the aesthetic of your wedding and reception. This is a limited set of options compared to many other themes but sometimes the number of options in modern themes is overwhelming and this might be a nice simplification for those less experienced with WordPress.
Wedding Day
The Wedding Day theme offers all the features you need in a wedding theme with a beautiful modern layout and left side menu. This theme might not be for everyone and could be a little confusing for older relatives and friends, but it’s a novel take on a wedding site so check it out just in case.
Qaween
Qaween is a beautiful parallax theme for weddings that could easily work for other projects after your wedding is over. It is row-based and has tons great features like RSVP forms, countdown timers, built-in maps and much more. This is a very modern theme so be sure to check it out.
Epicurean Theme
Album Nunta
April 1, 2015 at 1:59 amBeautiful themes! I like honeymoon theme a lot!