What wedding website should you use?

Are your guests traveling? Answer that before you compare a single feature list. Every wedding website carries a schedule, an RSVP form and a page of details, so the platforms separate on what sits around that, and nothing separates them as hard as travel.

A wedding across town needs a page guests read once and a form they fill in. A wedding where eighty people fly in needs rooms held at a hotel, arrival times, who is staying where, and a way for guests to pay for their own beds without you running a front desk.

So the thing to check on any platform you are considering is what it does with rooms. Is accommodation a text box you type a hotel name into, or a list of rooms a guest can book against and pay for? That one difference is worth more than template counts, and it is the difference this site was built around: we booked out a hotel in South Tyrol for our own wedding, the hotel sent one bill, and there was no way to collect from guests.

Rank what you need the platform to carry. There are four common answers, and each one points somewhere different: the registry, finding vendors, the guest-facing site itself, or the logistics of getting people there and housed.

Aisle keeps a page per platform with that detail: Zola, The Knot, Joy, Squarespace and Wix, with all seven side by side in the roundup. Read the one that matches your answer instead of all six.

Read them as our reading of the category, because that is what they are. We do not re-check competitor pricing from inside this guide, and platforms move features between tiers without announcing it. Open the platform's own pricing page before you pay for anything.

Compare what you will have paid by the wedding, not what it costs to sign up. A free platform is free at the door, and the money appears later as a custom domain, a premium template, or a feature held behind a paid tier you did not know existed when you picked.

Aisle's own number, so you can hold it against whatever you find: $19.99 a month after a 7-day free trial, one price with every feature in it. The one thing sold on top is the domain name itself. A .com bought through Aisle is $40 a year, and pointing a domain you already own at your site costs nothing.

The free platforms are cheaper in plain dollars, and for a wedding down the road that is a good enough reason to pick one. A paid platform has to earn the difference in work you would otherwise do by hand.

The people who use your wedding website are your guests, and they will open it on a phone, probably once, a few days before they travel. What stands between them and the answer they came for is a real difference between platforms.

There are four ways in, roughly: a public URL anyone can open, one shared password for everybody, an account each guest creates, or a check against the phone number you already have for them. Each costs the guest something different, and the last one costs them the least.

Aisle uses the phone number. A guest types it, gets in, and sees their own details: their room, their events, their travel, not the whole wedding's. No account, no app to download, no password to circulate in a group chat. If you are choosing between platforms, ask what your least technical guest has to do at 11pm the night before a flight.

The site outlives the wedding by longer than anyone plans for. Guests go back to it for photos, for the address of the place they liked, for the name of the band. So ask three things before you commit, of any platform.

Does the site stay up when you stop paying, or does it go dark with the subscription? Can you get your guest list out as a file you own? And if you bought a domain through the platform, can you move it somewhere else later?

On Aisle: cancel and your site stays live, and your data stays exportable. Ask the same question of whatever you are comparing us to, and get the answer before the wedding rather than after it.