A wedding website in Australia, free to build

Yes, and which one suits you depends on what the free site has to do. Joy gives away its website, online RSVP and registry with no guest cap. Minted's wedding website with RSVPs is free too, and a custom web address is a paid upgrade. Riley & Grey lets you design free but charges a membership to publish, and Squarespace has no free plan at all, only a 14-day trial before a subscription.

There are Australian options as well. Dear Delilah sells digital invitations and wedding microsites in Australian dollars, and Websites for Occasions, an Australian-owned business, builds wedding websites for couples. Neither is on the sheet our comparisons are built from, so they get a mention here and no grade or price.

Ours is free to build and free to share with your first 10 guests, which is enough to send to both sets of parents and the bridal party before you commit. Publishing for the whole list is 71 AUD once. What that buys is the part the free builders leave out or charge for separately: an animated envelope that opens into the site, background music, and the invitation and the website as one link rather than two.

Most Australian weddings are led by a celebrant, often outdoors: a winery lawn, a beach reserve, a garden in the hills. Celebrants tend to start on time, so put an arrival time on the order of the day, twenty or thirty minutes before the ceremony, as its own row. Say what guests will stand or sit on, whether there is shade, and what happens if it rains, because a guest choosing shoes for grass or sand needs to know before the day, not in the car park.

When the reception is in a different suburb or town, give it its own location block with its own map button, and say how people get there: the shuttle time, the parking, or the drive. A guest who opens the link on the way out of the ceremony then finds the reception in one tap.

Knowing this now saves a surprise later. There is no gift registry: if you keep one with a store, mention it in a text section. The address is wedvite.net followed by your names rather than a domain of your own, and there is no password on the page, so share it as you would any private invitation. We do not send reminders or delivery reports either. Your dashboard shows who has replied, and a short text a week before the RSVP date covers the rest.

If one of those is essential, Joy is the free alternative with a registry, plus a paid domain that forwards to its own address, and Squarespace gives you a full multi-page site for a monthly fee. If what you want is an invitation guests remember and a page that answers their questions, the one-page version is quicker to build, and at 71 AUD it costs the same for a small list as for a long one.