When to send your wedding website: month by month.

The wedding website timeline is really about pacing. You are not trying to publish everything on day one. You are trying to hand each piece of information to your guests at the moment they need it, in the mood they need it. Send the venue address ten months out and half the guest list will forget it by January. Send the shuttle plan two weeks out and everyone will screenshot it and thank you.

This guide walks the ten months before your wedding, phase by phase. It assumes you are working with a bespoke site, not a template. Template builders lock you into a fixed structure and a rushed launch; a custom Digithad site lets information reveal itself the way your day unfolds, in the languages your families speak, behind a private URL that stays out of search engines until you say otherwise. That flexibility matters, because a wedding is not a product page. It is a story told over months.

10 months out: the skeletal launch

Ten months before the wedding is when the site goes live, but not fully. Only the essentials. Your names, the date, the city, a beautiful hero image, and a way for guests to save the date. Everything else fills in behind the scenes over the coming weeks.

Why so early? Because this is when your save-the-dates go out, and your save-the-date needs somewhere to point. A pretty printed card with a URL on the back is doing two jobs at once: it captures attention, and it hands guests a permanent home for the details you have not written yet. Ten months out gives international relatives real time to hunt for flights, request time off, and check that their passports are not about to expire.

At Digithad we launch the skeleton with a live countdown, a warm photograph or short film, and a friendly "more details coming soon" note that never feels apologetic. The site is hidden from search engines from day one; guests reach it through the link you send them, and no one else. You have not committed anything in public. You have committed only to the date.

8 months out: the story and the where

Eight months before the day, the site starts to breathe. You add the how-we-met story, the venue name and city, hotel suggestions, a first pass at dress code, and any travel notes that help long-distance guests plan their trip. It is still not a launch; it is a gentle expansion of what you already published.

This is when passport reminders live at the top of the travel page. If a chunk of your guest list needs to fly in from abroad, tell them now, before renewal wait times get ugly. One sentence is enough. Your friends who are already procrastinating will thank you in April.

If your families speak different languages, this is the phase where a multilingual site earns its keep. Digithad builds true parallel versions, not machine-translated tabs, so your grandmother in Mexico City reads the same warm story your groom's cousin reads in French. Each language sits at its own clean URL, sharing the same design and the same private password. You are still not showing the full schedule, and you are still not opening the RSVP. Guests get the shape of the celebration and the scaffolding to start booking. That is exactly enough.

6 months out: full site, RSVP opens

Six months out, printed invitations get designed, and the website hits its full form. Every page is on. The schedule appears. Maps are pinned. Dietary questions are ready. The RSVP form goes live the same week your invitations mail out, so guests can respond the moment they open the envelope.

This is the phase most template builders treat as launch day, which is why template weddings feel rushed. You have already been live for four months. Guests have already saved the date, checked flights, and booked hotel rooms in the block. Now they are reading the details in a calm, curious mood instead of a scrambling one, and that changes the whole tone of the RSVP.

RSVP questions deserve their own thought, and we wrote a full guide on the ones that actually help. See our piece on wedding RSVP questions to ask. For now, remember: open the door six months out. That gives your caterer a real head-count window and gives you a comfortable, generous chase for the stragglers who never open email. Opening earlier is fine for large weddings with lots of out-of-town travel; opening later is a mistake we see couples regret.

4 months out: the block deadline and the fine detail

Four months before the wedding, hotel blocks start to expire. This is when the site pushes reminders to the top of the travel page: "Rooms in the Willow Suite block release March 12," in a warm color you cannot miss. If you are running a shuttle from the ceremony to the reception, this is when the pickup point goes public and the departure times get committed to the schedule.

Fine details also settle here. The rehearsal dinner logistics for the immediate family. The welcome drinks the night before, if you are hosting one. The morning-after brunch. Any pre-events that guests need to think about as they book flights and plan their arrival.

We also recommend a short, honest note about kids at this stage. If your celebration is adults only, this is the moment to say so kindly, on a dedicated page rather than buried inside the RSVP flow. Guests need time to arrange care, and clarity now saves an awkward conversation later. Everything you post from four months out is the version guests will read on the plane. Treat it as final unless something urgent shifts.

6 weeks out: the RSVP deadline and the polite chase

Six weeks before the wedding is the RSVP deadline. This is not arbitrary. Your caterer needs a real count four to six weeks in advance. Your stationer needs it for place cards and menus. Your seating chart needs a full week of iteration before it can be locked. Six weeks is the number that lets every downstream vendor do their job without a scramble.

Automatic reminders do the awkward work for you. Two weeks before the deadline, and one week before, the site emails anyone who has not responded. The message is friendly, written in your voice, and includes a one-tap link back to the personal RSVP page for that guest. Nobody feels chased. Everyone gets an answer in on time.

You will still have three or four holdouts. Those get a personal text from you or your parents, which is exactly what you would have done anyway; only now the list is short and manageable instead of forty names long. Template builders often skip the reminder infrastructure entirely, or gate it behind a paid tier. On a Digithad site, it is built in and quietly working while you are busy with the seating chart.

2 weeks out: the week-of reminder

Two weeks before the wedding, the site freezes for structural changes. No new pages. No renamed sections. No moved times. Guests are checking the site on their phones during their commute, screenshotting the address, forwarding the schedule to their sitter. Any change you make now propagates through a hundred group chats you cannot see, and it always ends with someone showing up at the wrong venue.

This is when the "week-of" reminder goes out. It is a short, warm email or text to every confirmed guest, with a link back to the site. It includes the ceremony start time, the parking or shuttle plan, the dress code in one plain sentence, and any weather-adaptive notes like "bring a light layer for the evening." If guests need to arrive early for a specific reason, this is where you say it.

The tone is casual. It reads like a friend reminding a friend, because that is what it is. We help our couples draft this in advance, so the studio can queue it and hit send while you are getting your nails done or your best friend is trying on their shoes for the sixth time. You do not want to be writing this reminder yourself the Sunday before your wedding.

Day of: quiet

On the day of the wedding, the site does nothing. And that is exactly the point.

Guests already have everything they need. Every phone in every pocket has the address, the parking notes, and the schedule loaded in a browser tab. Your parents are not fielding logistics calls. You are not, either. Your planner has the same information on their clipboard, and the site is not competing with any of it. The quiet is the payoff for all the pacing you have done.

If something changes at the last minute, a rare weather delay, a ceremony moved indoors, you still have a single mechanism to reach the entire guest list at once: a push notification through the site to everyone subscribed, plus a live update to the schedule page. It is one edit, not a hundred texts. Everyone else, including the couple, is off duty. This is the phase we design the whole timeline to protect.

After: photos, thank-yous, and the quiet archive

The week after the wedding, the site gets a soft second life. Your photographer's gallery lives at the same URL your guests already have bookmarked. The video from the ceremony finds a home on the schedule page. Speech transcripts land there if your parents wrote them out, or if a friend recorded a toast on their phone.

Thank-you notes go out on paper, always, but the site can carry a warm public note as well. A single page, a photograph, a paragraph. Guests read it, smile, and forward it to a cousin who could not come.

After that, the site quiets. Twelve months after your date, you decide whether it stays live in archival mode as a private memory album for the two of you, or comes down entirely. We move it into read-only, remove the RSVP forms, and let the URL sit undisturbed. Search engines never touched it. Your guests keep the link if they want it. Everyone else, including the internet at large, never knew it was there. That is the last quiet gift of a custom, private site: it belongs to your circle, on your terms, for as long as you want it to.

The whole timeline in one table

If you prefer the timeline at a glance, here it is. Print it, tape it to the fridge, forget about it until the next milestone.

Packages that carry the whole timeline

Every Digithad wedding website is one-time priced, stays online for twelve months, and ships in about a week from your green light. Three packages, three sizes:

• Essential, $490. A single elegant page with countdown, RSVP, schedule and maps. Perfect for intimate weddings that need the timeline but not the complexity.
• Signature, $990. The full experience most couples choose: multi-section custom design, gift registry, password protection, digital save-the-date, and the auto-reminder infrastructure that keeps the six-week and two-week milestones humming without your help.
• Prestige, $1,890. Fully bespoke art direction, multilingual site for mixed families, seating tool, and concierge support until the last thank-you note is stamped.

Your date is booked with a 50% deposit, invoiced securely, wherever you are in the world. Compare packages on our pricing page.

Questions couples ask

Written by the Digithad studio

We design private, custom wedding websites for couples with mixed families, guests scattered across the world, and no patience for template builders. Updated July 2026.