Free wedding websites: which ones are actually free in 2026

Mostly, yes — and that surprises people who expect a catch. The wedding website is the part of this market that has been free for years, because it is not what the big platforms sell. Zola, Joy, The Knot and Minted each publish a wedding website, an online RSVP and hosting at no cost, with no trial period and no paid plan you have to reach to use them. Paid options do sit alongside the free tier at some of them — Minted prices a custom URL, a concierge session and an original-artwork site above its free website, and Joy sells Premium digital cards and SMS add-ons — but none of that gates the free website itself. Wix is free in a different way: the site is free to build and publish, but the free plan keeps a wixsite.com subdomain with a Wix banner ad.

Free is real on all five, and the money is made somewhere else.

Where it is made is worth knowing before you choose, because it shapes the product. Zola and The Knot are stationery businesses first: the free site is the front door to printed invitations sold per card (from $1.79 a card at Zola, $1.99 a card at 100 quantity at The Knot, both US list prices in US dollars). Joy monetises registry purchases and sells paid Premium digital cards and SMS add-ons. Minted sells paper, an original-artwork website from $270 and a $49 concierge session. Wix sells subscriptions. None of that makes the free tier dishonest; it makes it a real product with a business behind it.

The one paid extra all four share is the address. A custom domain is $19.99 a year at The Knot ($99.99 for the .wedding extension), from $17.99 at Zola and about $19.99 a year at Joy, and Minted sells a custom URL at $15 a year. What you get for it differs. Zola and Joy both say their paid domain forwards to the builder's address rather than masking it, so zola.com and withjoy.com stay in the browser bar; The Knot sells the domain itself, with a .wedding extension if you want one; Minted's help centre prices the custom URL without saying what happens to the free address Minted gives you, so we do not say either; and on Wix a domain needs a paid plan. If you never wanted your own domain, the free tier genuinely costs nothing.

We should say this plainly, because the query deserves a straight answer: Wedvite does not sell a free wedding website. What is free is the whole design and the first share. You open the editor without paying, pick from more than 30 designs, write your own words in your own language with right-to-left Arabic set properly, add your photos, your music, the venue map and the RSVP, and send the live link to your first 10 guests. Nothing is watermarked and nothing is a preview — those guests see exactly what everyone else will see.

Publishing for everyone is $89, paid once, for unlimited guests. There is no subscription and no per-guest fee; hosting runs through your wedding date and at least 90 days after. A few extras are optional and priced on top — custom music, a wax seal with your initials, a custom venue sketch, a second language — and the pricing page lists each one. A hero-only save the date is $19 and is never discounted. What we do not offer is a custom domain — your invitation lives on a wedvite.net link — and we do not message your guests for you; you send the link over WhatsApp, text or email yourself, and their replies land in your dashboard.

So if your whole list is 10 people, Wedvite is free. If it is not, the free builders above are genuinely better value for a plain website, and the reason to pay us is a different thing: one link that opens as an animated invitation, with the venue, the music, the schedule and the RSVP inside it, instead of a card in one place and a site in another. See what $89 includes, or open a few designs on your phone first.

Open ToscanaOpen AuroraOpen Santorini

Four situations, and none of them apply to most weddings. The first is the address. On a free plan the URL belongs to the builder — a wixsite.com subdomain on Wix's free plan, and at Zola and Joy a custom domain that forwards rather than masks, so the builder's address stays in the browser bar. If your names in the URL matter to you, price the address in before you choose: $19.99 a year at The Knot buys the domain itself, $15 a year buys Minted's custom URL, and from $17.99 at Zola or about $19.99 a year at Joy buys the forwarding kind (USD).

The second is what your guests see. Wix's free plan carries a wixsite.com subdomain with a Wix banner ad — fine for a personal site, less so on the page where your family confirms a wedding. We found no advertising to guests on Zola or The Knot on 15 September 2026. Minted's pages supported only a qualified answer, so its row reads “Partly”, and Joy's did not state it at all, so its row reads “not verified” — neither is a guess in either direction.

The third is the invitation. Two of the five sell no digital wedding invitation at all — Zola and The Knot both say so on their own pages — so if you go that route the plan is a free website plus printed cards, or a free website plus a digital save the date and paper later. That can be exactly right, and digital vs paper wedding invitations and the cost of wedding invitations work through the arithmetic.

The fourth is how much of your own time you want to spend. A free builder gives you a site; filling it well is a weekend, and what to include on a wedding website lists what it needs. If you would rather send one finished thing than build and maintain two, that is the case for an invitation that carries the website inside it — see how our wedding website works, real wedding website examples or, for UK couples, the best wedding websites UK.

On 15 September 2026 we opened each builder's own pricing or help pages and wrote down what the free tier includes in their words, whether RSVP is part of it, what a custom domain costs, whether guests are shown advertising, and whether a digital wedding invitation is included. Where a page did not state something we wrote “not verified” rather than estimating it, and the pages we read are linked under the table and in each write-up.

Wedvite wrote this page and is one of the rows, so read it with that in mind — and note what the row says: no custom domain, a free tier that stops at 10 guests, and guest messaging that runs through your own WhatsApp rather than ours. Where a free builder is the better answer we have said so. Every head-to-head we have written is on the compare hub, the wider round-up is best digital wedding invitations, and the answers to the questions couples ask us are on the FAQ.