The three tiers of wedding website
There are really three flavors of wedding website, and they exist on a scale from "no cash, all trade" to "custom, mine forever." The three are: free template builders (Zola, The Knot, Joy, Riley & Grey's free tier), paid template builders (Squarespace, Wix, Webflow templates), and custom design (Digithad and a small handful of similar studios).
Each is a legitimate choice. Each has a real cost, in cash or in hours or in what you quietly trade for the free part. This guide walks through all three honestly, so you can pick with your eyes open rather than picking the first thing that looks free and finding out six months later what "free" meant.
If you already know you want a custom wedding website, skip to the fourth section; the rest of this page will still be useful when a well-meaning friend asks why you didn't just use Zola.
Free template builders: the true cost
Free template builders cost zero dollars for the site itself. The cost is everywhere else, and it's real enough that couples routinely regret the choice about six months in, when their wedding is one of two hundred thousand indexed by Google that year, and their aunt in Casablanca can't figure out how to switch the RSVP into French.
Your data. Free platforms fund themselves by selling aggregate wedding data to registry partners, gift companies, honeymoon travel providers, and (increasingly) advertising networks. Some sell more than aggregates. Every RSVP you collect, every guest name, every address, becomes marketing signal for the platform. That may be fine with you; the point is that it is the trade, and it is not always disclosed as clearly as it should be.
Your privacy. Almost all free builders default to public. Google indexes your names, your venue, your date, your registry, your love story. Your wedding page is discoverable by anyone who searches your names for the next year, and it lingers in Google's cache after that. If either of you has any complicated online presence (a job that involves discretion, a family situation you'd prefer to keep quiet, a stalker in a previous life), the default is a problem. See our wedding website privacy guide for what public actually means.
Your aesthetic. Template builders let you pick from 20 to 60 themes. Every theme is used by tens of thousands of other couples that year. Your parents' generation used the same wedding stationer as their neighbors; the modern equivalent is the same wedding-site template as ten thousand strangers. Not a disaster, but not yours.
If those three tradeoffs are fine with you, a free builder is a legitimate choice. Many couples happily use them and never notice the trade. The problems are silent, which is precisely what makes them worth naming.
Paid template builders
Paid template builders sit in the middle. Squarespace or Wix with a wedding template costs about $200 to $500 for the year: a $12 to $30 domain, a $12 to $25 per month subscription, and a $50 to $200 premium template if you want one that doesn't look like the default. Total: real dollars, but modest.
The trade with paid builders is different. Your data is more your own; these platforms are software companies, not registry marketplaces. Your privacy is more configurable; you can set the site to require a password, and you can uncheck the "index this on Google" box in the settings. Your aesthetic is more your own than a free builder allows, but still bounded by the template's design system: type, color, layout are all things you tune, not things you invent.
The real cost of a paid template is time. Fifteen to thirty hours is the honest range for making a template look like you, not like the template. If both partners work on it together, double the hours. If you value your combined hours at even a modest rate, the "cheap" template starts looking less cheap by the third weekend spent trying to align a button with a heading.
Paid templates are the right choice when the two of you enjoy design work, have thirty hours to spare, and want the finished site to feel more yours than a free builder allows. If any of those three isn't true, keep reading.
Custom design: what $490 to $1,890 buys you
Custom design is what Digithad does. $490 to $1,890 one-time, no subscription, no monthly fee, no upgrade path, no upsell. The site is yours. Here's what each tier actually buys, in plain terms.
Essential, $490. A one-page bespoke wedding site. Delivered in about a week from the discovery call. Hosting included for 12 months. RSVP, countdown, program, maps, dress code, hotel suggestions. Fully custom design: your invitation is where the palette and typography start; the site is designed around that, not fitted to a template. Mobile-perfect. Private by default. Best fit: intimate weddings under 60 guests where a single beautiful page carries everything.
Signature, $990. The full experience, and the choice most couples make. Multi-section site with a hero, story page, ceremony details, reception details, RSVP, hotels, photo gallery, digital save-the-date, gift registry integration, password protection. Two languages included in the price (English plus one of Hebrew, French, Arabic, Spanish, Farsi, and others). If your family is mixed, this is where the site starts earning its price on the first day. See multilingual wedding websites.
Prestige, $1,890. Fully bespoke art direction. Custom animations, live-stream integration, seating plan tool, three or more languages, RSVP tiered by event, a concierge who works with you until the wedding morning. Best fit: large weddings, destination weddings, celebrations with unusual complexity (three-day events, multi-city ceremonies, high-profile guest lists), or couples who want the site to feel like a small piece of couture design.
All three tiers are one-time. All three include 12 months of hosting. All three come with the design proposal within 72 hours of your discovery call, so you know what you're paying for before any deposit is invoiced.
What isn't in the price
Three things sit outside the package price, and it's fair to know about them before the discovery call.
The domain name, if you want a custom one like YourNames.com or YourNames.wedding, costs about $15 to $30 per year and is bought directly through a registrar (Namecheap, Cloudflare, Porkbun, others). We help you pick and connect it; the annual fee is yours.
Premium font licensing, if you specifically want a font that isn't covered by our standard library. Most weddings never trigger this; the fonts we use for editorial custom sites are already licensed for commercial use. If you fall in love with a specific type family we don't have, the licensing runs $30 to $200 one-time and is passed through to you at cost.
Custom illustration, if you want a hand-drawn portrait of the two of you or a bespoke monogram. This is not standard; the couples who commission it usually love it. Illustration ranges from $150 to $800 depending on scope, and we work with two illustrators we recommend.
Everything else in the tier is in the tier. No surprises, no hidden line items on the invoice, no fifteen upsells at checkout.
Which choice is right for whom
Here's the honest answer, tier by tier, with no marketing gloss.
A free template builder is the right choice when your wedding is small and local, when your guest list will not react to a template aesthetic, when neither of you has any online presence that requires privacy, and when you're happy trading your data for the free tier. Nothing wrong with this choice. Millions of weddings a year use it well.
A paid template builder is the right choice when you enjoy design work, have thirty hours to invest, want more control than a free builder gives, and want to keep the site off Google. Squarespace's wedding templates are genuinely good if you're patient with them; Wix has more variety but rougher edges. Budget the time honestly; the site can be beautiful, but it won't be beautiful in the first weekend.
Custom design is the right choice when the site needs to feel like yours, when your family is mixed and multilingual, when privacy is a real requirement rather than a nice-to-have, when you don't have thirty hours to spend in a template configurator, or when the wedding itself carries enough complexity (destination, cultural mix, three-day celebration) that a template will visibly struggle. If any two of those apply, the custom route saves money by the end.
Still unsure? Our do you need a wedding website guide has the seven-question test that gives couples a clearer read in ten minutes than another hour of Reddit.
The hidden cost of DIY: your time
Fifteen to thirty hours in a template configurator is not an exaggeration. It's the honest range when a couple sets out to make a Squarespace template look like theirs rather than like the template. Both of you working on it means double the hours; one working alone means resentment when the other doesn't help with the RSVP question logic at 11 p.m. on a Wednesday.
Value your combined 40 hours at even $50 an hour (which is low if either of you does knowledge work), and the "cheap" template site costs $2,000 in your time before you have paid for the template itself. Value it at your actual hourly rate, and the math tilts further. A $990 Signature package is done in one 15-minute discovery call plus two rounds of feedback on a proposal; total time investment from you is under three hours.
None of this makes the DIY route wrong. Some couples genuinely enjoy the design work; treat it as a shared project, discover things they love about each other's taste, and end up with a site they're proud of. If that's you, go for it. If it isn't, save your Sunday afternoons for a walk together and let a studio do what studios exist to do.
The custom route, no surprises.
A 15-minute discovery call, a proposal within 72 hours, and one flat price. No monthly fee, no upsells, no data sold to registry partners.
Questions couples ask
How much does a wedding website cost?+
Free template builders cost zero dollars in cash but sell your data and your privacy. Paid template builders (Squarespace, Wix) cost $200 to $500 plus 15 to 30 hours of your time. Custom-designed wedding websites at Digithad cost $490 to $1,890 one-time, no subscription, with the site online for a year. The right choice depends on how much design control matters and how much time you have.
Is a free wedding website really free?+
Free in cash. Not free in what you trade. Public by default, indexed by Google, scraped by AI training sets, your aggregate data sold to registry partners. That's fine for many couples; it's a real problem for others. Read the terms; the trade is explicit if you look for it.
What do you get for $490 vs $990 vs $1,890 at Digithad?+
$490 (Essential) is a one-page bespoke design with RSVP, countdown, program, and maps, delivered in about a week. $990 (Signature) is the full experience most couples choose: multi-section design, photo and video gallery, gift registry integration, digital save-the-date, password protection. $1,890 (Prestige) is fully bespoke with live streaming, seating plan tool, custom animations, and a concierge until the wedding day.
How does the cost of a wedding website compare to the rest of the wedding budget?+
Small. A $990 Signature package is less than most photography contracts, less than most cakes, and less than a single arrangement in the floral order. Compared to the catering total, it's a rounding error. What it saves in stress and phone calls is hard to price but real; $990 buys about a hundred hours of guest-communication work.
We design celebration websites for families across the English-speaking world: weddings, engagements, bar and bat mitzvahs, brits, baptisms. Updated July 2026.