E-invitation or wedding website? What the difference is for
A wedding website is somewhere guests go. An e-invitation is something you hand them. That sounds like a distinction without a difference until the RSVP deadline, when one of the two is quietly counting your seats and the other is waiting for people to remember it exists.
Invitation formatsReviewed 4 min read
What a wedding website is for
A wedding website is a standing page about the wedding, usually live for months. It holds your story, the entourage, a registry, travel notes for guests flying in, and often a gallery afterwards. It goes up early, it gets shared once, and guests dip into it when a question occurs to them.
It is genuinely useful for a wedding where a real share of the guest list is travelling. Cousins flying in from Dubai or Toronto have questions a card cannot answer: which airport, which hotel, whether there is a shuttle, what the weather does in that month. A standing page is the right shape for that.
The weakness is that nobody visits a website on a schedule. A page that has to be remembered will be remembered by the organised third of your list and forgotten by the rest, which is fine for travel notes and fatal for a headcount.
What an e-invitation is for
An e-invitation is the invitation itself, delivered as a link on Messenger, Viber or email. It arrives rather than waiting to be found, and the reply lives on the same page as the details. That is the whole difference: it is sent, and being sent is what gets it opened.
Because it is sent, it can be sent again. A follow-up two weeks before the deadline is one message with the same link in it, and the page a guest lands on is the current one rather than whatever it said in March.
It can also carry most of what a wedding website carries. Ours hold the programme, both venues with their own map pins, the attire palette, a save the date film and the entourage, on the same link as the reply.
The difference that actually matters
One of them chases and the other waits. An e-invitation lands in a thread your guest already reads, and a wedding website sits at an address they have to recall. For a Filipino guest list, where a great deal of coordination happens in group chats, that difference decides how many replies you get.
| Wedding website | E-invitation | |
|---|---|---|
| How guests reach it | They remember the address | It arrives in a chat |
| Best at | Travel notes, registry, story | Replies, programme, directions |
| Timing | Up for months | Sent, then re-sent |
| Gives you a headcount | Sometimes | That is the point of it |
| Works for the titas | If somebody sends the link | Yes, they were sent the link |
A page nobody opens is not a cheaper invitation. It is a more expensive silence.
Which one a Filipino wedding usually needs
The e-invitation, most of the time. Filipino weddings are big, local and coordinated in group chats, so the thing that arrives beats the thing that waits. A separate wedding website earns its keep when a real portion of your guests are flying in and need travel answers a card cannot hold.
In practice the split we see is simple. If fewer than about twenty guests are travelling, the invitation carries everything and a second site is a second thing to maintain. Past that, a couple of extra pages on the same link usually does the job without becoming a separate project.
You are allowed to have both
And it does not have to mean two builds. Extra pages for travel, hotels or a story section can sit on the same link as the invitation, which keeps one address to share and one thing to update when something moves.
Would you rather hand it over?
What each one costs here
A do-it-yourself wedding website on an international builder runs from free to roughly USD 20 a month, billed in dollars. A done-for-you e-invitation here runs from about PHP 1,500 to PHP 8,000 as one payment. Ours is ₱4,999 for a wedding of up to 400 guests.
The subscription is the part that catches people. A monthly fee is cheap for one month and less cheap across the fourteen months between the engagement and the honeymoon, and the page usually comes down when you stop paying, photographs and all.
Ours is one payment per event and the link stays up for 12 months after the day, which is the part couples use most. If you want the full market picture rather than ours, the cost breakdown is here.
Asked about this
What is the difference between an e-invitation and a wedding website?
An e-invitation is sent to guests as a link and carries the reply on it. A wedding website is a standing page guests visit when a question occurs to them, usually holding travel notes, a registry and a story. One arrives; the other waits to be found.
Do I need a wedding website if I already have an e-invitation?
Usually not. If the invitation already carries the programme, both venues and the reply, a second site is a second thing to keep current. It earns its place when a real share of your guests are flying in and need travel answers.
Can a wedding website collect RSVPs?
Many can. The problem is not the form, it is the traffic: a page guests have to remember gets visited by the organised part of your list. If the reply matters, the invitation and the reply should arrive together in a message.
Is a wedding website worth it for guests coming from abroad?
Yes, for that group specifically. Airport, hotel block, shuttle times and what the weather does that month are all questions a card cannot answer, and answering them once on a page beats answering them thirty times in Messenger.
