Still here? Keep reading for the best practices for wedding industry websites.
Do you own a wedding venue or wedding business? If so, congratulations! You are in the wedding industry, which is one of the fastest-growing industries. To be successful, your wedding website must reflect how awesome you are and what you have to offer couples.
Every wedding business’s website is different, but some mistakes seem to be repeated. I’ll share the best practices for your wedding venue website.
Write warmhearted copy that tells the story of your wedding business brand.
Your wedding venue website design is important, but your copy is equally as important. The wedding experience is an emotional process for couples and your venue website has to speak to couples.
Include easy-to-access, upfront, and transparent information.
What does your website do for me? Why should I be there? If you don’t straightforwardly answer these questions from the get-go, people will bounce off your site faster than they can say “I do.” The home page is your best opportunity to establish what’s so great about this venue – and it needs to make an impression fast! You must include pricing/investment/package info, how to schedule a tour, FAQs, and event space virtual tours. If you want to woo them, show them some real wedding inspiration from real weddings at your venue.
Make your wedding venue website a good experience.
A good layout is crucial to the success of your wedding venue website. You want your website to be easily navigable for the customer because it will make their lives easier and they’ll enjoy their experience on your site more!
Don’t forget that if you have different packages on your site, each one should be easy to find. Make sure that customers can easily compare the different prices.
Don’t have too many items on your menu – this will confuse people! If you do offer packages or a different event type, consider adding them as toggles so people can see the differences.
Not only do you want happy and educated wedding couples, but also ones who don’t get frustrated with navigating around your site. They’re going to leave without contacting you, and that’s a missed opportunity to book a prime wedding date…all due to poor website design.
Here’s what to include in your navigation and layout.
Keep it as simple as possible and guide them to do what you want them to do. If you want them to visit the home page, then the wedding page, and then pricing, and finally to book a tour, then do just that! Don’t have too many calls to action or buttons – it’s confusing and they won’t know which to pick and will leave your site, trust us.
Nowadays, we remove the “ABOUT US” page altogether or keep it in the footer. Wedding couples (and Millennials) are all about “me me me”, so they’re not focused so much on the about page information, as cool as you and your backstory are.
Use these tips when creating your venue’s website on WordPress.
– Use small (optimally sized) wedding photos instead of big photos and images for headers, logos, gallery, etc. Bigger photos usually mean longer load time! Make sure they are sized appropriately for mobile devices so that visitors can navigate without difficulty if they’re viewing the site on their phone. Photos that are served as. webp instead of .jpg or .png are favored by Google.
– Don’t put too many plugins on your wedding venue website, only the ones that are necessary. You don’t need Google Analytics plugins or plugins to insert Instagram feeds or other clunky plugins. They only slow your website down and deter potential site visitors.
– Use Rank Math’s SEO plugin instead of Yoast. It’s less bloated and has more features, and won’t slow your website down. You can even import your Yoast SEO settings into Rank Math.
– Use an optimization plugin such as Light Speed Cache. This will finetune your website and help your site speed.
Less is more. If you’re a venue owner and you need more help than listed above, reach out to us!
Get their undivided attention by using SEO best practices.
The wedding and event industry is saturated, as you know. Directory listings will always have the top spots on Google for wedding venue searches because they pay thousands to do just that. Speaking of the Knot…
Does your site matter more than your venue listing on directory websites?
Yes and no. You’ll likely never outrank TK outside of local listings (local listings matter more, anyway), but you should at least have a free search listing on TK to have a backlink to your website.
We always encourage wedding industry clients to spend their money on Google Ads and SEO over TK.
Why? On TK, you’re competing with a gazillion other wedding and event venues. Once millennials fill out that generic form (“Hi, we’d love more information about your venue!”) that gets sent to you, they’re bombarded with fifteen other event venues to look at. Then your event venue becomes less special to them.
Here are some final tips and ideas to help you shine.
Millennials and couples are in the beginning stages of their search and planning their weddings, especially the venue and wedding vendors search, are usually pretty clueless. They’re all over the place, from googling wedding ideas on Pinterest to searching for gold star-themed weddings.
If you can prove that you are an invaluable resource to them when planning their weddings, they’ll already have a closer attachment to you than other unhelpful websites.
Suppose you have ideas, tips, vendors, past events, an updated gallery, or even better – a virtual tour of your venue spaces, reviews, tools, budget calculator, inspiration, a photo gallery, video gallery, team members, and other useful information. In that case, they’ll be able to make a much more informed decision.
We only work with a handful of venues.
Whether you’re in London or LA, we only work with one venue in a geographic radius, so you don’t have to worry about us working with your competitors on their site or SEO. Sorry San Francisco, Mountain House Estate’s claimed us!
Good luck with your website design!
We hope this blog post has been helpful. Please contact us if you have questions about your web design, SEO strategy, marketing plan, or anything related to weddings, ideas, tips, digital content, and website maintenance!
