Wedding website with custom domain: subdomain or own domain?

An address is the one element of a wedding website that leaves the internet. It goes onto card stock, into a QR code and, if it is short enough, into a sentence somebody says out loud across a kitchen table.

That makes it a different kind of decision from every other one on the page, because it is the only one whose deadline is set by a printer rather than by you.

The address hides two decisions usually treated as one: the name and the ending. The name has to fit on a card, survive being read out over the phone and still be right in two years; the ending decides how familiar the address looks and what renewal costs. Settle both before printing — a page can be rebuilt, a printed address cannot.

Two forms of address are on offer, and the honest starting point is that guests cannot tell them apart. Both open the same page at the same speed on the same phone. The difference lands on you, and it lands in three places: what it costs, how long it takes, and what happens to it once the wedding is over.

So it is worth deciding from the printed card backwards rather than from the pricing page forwards. What survives that direction of travel is usually shorter than what you first wrote down.

The choice is between two forms. A subdomain puts your chosen name in front of a wedding domain from the package: reachable within minutes, no registration. A custom domain is the full address, registered in your name. For guests both open the same page — the difference shows when somebody reads it aloud, types it on an old phone, or looks at a thank-you card years later.

One test takes three seconds: dictate the name to somebody over the phone. If they ask whether there is a hyphen in it, you have your answer. First names beat surnames — shorter, and they commit nobody, which counts for more with blended families or separated parents than the nicer ring. You get three to 63 characters, lower-case letters, digits and hyphens, none at the start or the end; accents and umlauts do not work, so Jörg becomes joerg. A dot is allowed, which makes lea.benjamin valid. Words such as mail or info are reserved — and a name is only free until somebody takes it.

For an address, the pricing question is not a monthly figure but a term: how long does this address stay yours, and what does keeping it involve?

Two arrangements exist. Either the address comes with the package you are already paying for, or it is a contract of its own with a registrar, renewing on its own schedule and reminding you in its own way.

Here the address belongs to the package, not to a contract of its own: the chosen subdomain comes with the smaller package, a custom domain with the larger one. You pay once for a year, the year starts on purchase, and nothing renews by itself. Move up later and you pay the difference while keeping the year already running; renewal costs roughly a fifth less and is added to the existing end date, so renewing early costs you no days. If you want to be online early, that start date matters more than the price — it is what decides when a save-the-date website makes sense.

The wedding endings in the package come in a German-language and an international flavour; take the one your guests can read. Other endings are available as well, at a different price. Two questions first: what does the second year cost, rather than the promotional price of the first? And can the address then be pointed at your page at all? Over the phone .wedding explains itself less well than an ending everybody knows, and unfamiliar endings fare worse in strict spam filters. One-time payment instead of a subscription is the other half of the same sum.

Everything printed depends on the address existing first, and an address is not always available the moment you decide on it. Somebody else may hold the name, or a transfer may still be running on another provider's clock.

That turns a small administrative step into the one that sets your printing date. Treat it as a lead time rather than as a setting you flip on the evening the cards are approved.

A custom domain runs as a request: you name the address you want plus one or two alternatives, because the first choice may be taken; bring a domain you already own and the auth code from your current provider goes with it. The request moves through requested, query, in progress and completed, and an email arrives once the address is live. Only then does it belong on cards and inside the QR code — the code is generated from the address, so if that changes, printed codes point nowhere.

That fixes the order: secure the address, make the page reachable, then print. It pays to read how the QR code and the digital invitation work together beforehand. Allow waiting time when transferring an existing domain, because that runs on the old provider's clock. And for guests without a smartphone the address is not something to scan but something to type — short and without special characters.

An address carries information whether you meant it to or not. It is the one part of a private wedding page that is deliberately public, because being reachable is the whole point of it.

Two things follow from that, and they are easy to keep apart once named: what the address itself gives away, and what registering one in your own name records about you.

The address itself stays public, even when the content sits behind an invitation code: it appears in browser history, in a messenger's link preview and in every forwarded message. Put your surnames and the date into it and you have given away both before anyone opens the page. What a password or an invite code protects is a separate decision — the address is not part of it.

A custom domain adds registrant data: a registration records a real person with a postal address, and that record exists whichever ending you pick. What differs is who can read it back. Most .com-family endings have redacted personal contact details from the public register since 2018; .uk publishes the address by default and lets a non-trading individual opt out, which is a box somebody has to tick rather than something that happens by itself. Ask which of the two your ending is before you register — it is the one difference between a subdomain and a domain of your own that providers rarely mention unprompted.

Everything above comes down to a handful of questions you can answer in one sitting, before either the page or the print run exists.

Getting Married treats the address as part of the package rather than as a separate contract, which is why the choice here is between two package sizes and not between two suppliers.

For the address itself, four questions are enough:

• Is the name you want free — and do you like the spelling that is free?
• Can it be dictated over the phone without spelling it out?
• Is it settled before invitations and QR codes go to print?
• Should the address outlive the wedding — for thank-you cards and the gallery?

The last point is the one couples forget, because it only hurts after the party. The package runs for a year, and reminder emails arrive 30 days, 14 days and one day before it ends. Without a renewal the subdomain is released again and becomes available to other couples, and the gallery images are removed. If the address is printed on thank-you cards, plan the second year in from the start; if the page is only meant to carry you to the wedding, expiring is exactly right.