The story section is not for the two of you. It is for the guests who know one of you and have never met the other: your partner’s colleagues, the aunt who moved abroad before you were born, the school friend who has only ever seen a photograph. Write it for them and it does a job; write it for yourselves and it reads like a private message left somewhere strangers can see it. And if you would rather not write one at all, the story and the photo gallery are both optional - each section has an on/off toggle in the editor, so you can switch either one off and send the invitation without it.
Who the story section is actually for
Think about the room. Roughly half the people you are inviting are yours and half are your partner’s, and most of them have only met one side properly. Your friends have heard about your partner for as long as the two of you have been together. Their friends have heard about you. Almost nobody has heard both versions.
That is the gap the story fills. A guest who arrives knowing how you met, roughly when, and one true thing about the pair of you has something to say at the table. A guest who arrives knowing only a name spends the evening asking other guests who you are.
It matters too that people read this on a phone, usually while doing something else, in a chat window between two other messages. You have a small screen and a short window of attention, and that is the constraint the length has to respect.
How long it should be, and what goes in it
The story section is built as a short timeline. Each entry has a year, a short title and a few lines of description, and you add or remove entries as you like. That structure is doing you a favour: it stops the section turning into one long block of prose that nobody finishes.
Three to five entries of two or three sentences each is a shape worth aiming at. We are suggesting it, not measuring it, so treat it as a starting point to edit against. Longer than that and the reader scrolls past looking for the date and the venue, which is what they came for. If you cannot get it under five entries, the extra material probably belongs in a speech.
What earns its place:
- How you met, with enough detail that someone who was not there can picture the room
- One thing that is true about you as a pair, not only about the relationship
- The proposal, if you want it, told in two sentences rather than ten
- The families, if the families are the reason the wedding is happening at all
Read it aloud before you save it. Anything you would not say standing up in front of a hundred people, half of them your parents’ friends, tends to reveal itself on the second sentence.
What to leave out
Most story sections go wrong in the same few ways, and all of them come from writing for the wrong reader.
- Inside jokes. If it needs a footnote, it needs cutting.
- Nicknames nobody outside your own flat uses.
- Anyone who is not at the wedding. A previous relationship, a fallen-out friend, a difficult parent: naming them puts the reader somewhere uncomfortable.
- The long-distance chapter told in full. It is the part every couple wants to include and the part that means least to a stranger.
- Anything that reads as a message to your partner. Save it for the vows, where it belongs.
Humour is the hardest to judge. A line that lands with your friends can read as flippant to a grandparent, and some of your guests will be reading it in a language that is not their first. Keep the jokes short, and keep them about yourselves.
Choosing the photos
Fewer than you think. The gallery takes up to six photos, and six is a ceiling rather than a target. Four good ones do more work than six in which two of you are slightly blurred at somebody else’s wedding.
Pick photos where the faces are legible. A guest scrolling on a phone is looking at something roughly the size of a playing card, so a wide landscape shot with the two of you small in the frame reads as scenery. Vary them as well: six frames from the same engagement shoot, in the same light and the same pose, tell the reader one thing six times. One from before the engagement, one with family in it and one recent will carry further.
Watch the crop. Templates place photos into their own fixed shapes - a square, an arch, a tall portrait - and fill them, so anything sitting right at the edge of your frame may not survive. A subject near the centre is the safer choice. And check who else is in the picture: someone who is no longer in your life, or who has not been invited, is exactly the kind of thing a guest notices and mentions.
Why photo weight decides the first impression
Some of your guests will open this on a bus, on mobile data, on a phone that is four years old, in a country with a slower network than yours. The invitation is the first thing they see of your wedding. A page that stalls halfway makes a worse impression than a plain one that appears straight away.
Two things are handled for you. An uploaded photo is scaled down and re-encoded on its way into storage, so the full-size frame straight off your camera is never what a guest’s connection has to carry; a much lighter web copy is. And the gallery loads picture by picture as the reader arrives at each one, so your names and the date at the top of the page do not wait on the sixth photo at the bottom.
Neither of those rescues a gallery of six near-identical photos. The fastest gallery is still the one with the fewest photos in it.
When to leave both sections off
For plenty of weddings, neither section has a job to do.
If your wedding is thirty people who have all known both of you for years, the story tells them nothing they do not already know. If one of you is genuinely uncomfortable being written about in public, that is reason enough on its own, and the invitation is not the place to negotiate it. If this is a second marriage, or the families are delicate about how it came about, saying nothing is a real choice rather than a failure to write.
The same goes for photos you have not taken yet. Leave the gallery off, send the invitation, and switch the section on the week the shoot comes back. The address a guest already has is the address the finished gallery appears at, so nobody needs a second message.
An invitation with both sections switched off is not a lesser invitation. It is a card: names, date, place, and a way to reply. A good number of the designs read better that way.
Frequently asked questions
Do we have to write a story section at all?
No. It is a section with a toggle like any other, and an invitation with it switched off reads as a clean card. Write one if a decent share of your guest list has never met one of you. Skip it if everybody already knows you both.
How many photos should we put in the gallery?
The gallery takes up to six. Four or five varied ones read better than six from the same shoot, and fewer photos means the invitation appears faster for a guest on a slow connection.
Can we change the story or the photos after we have sent the invitation?
Yes. The invitation lives at one address that does not change, so a reworded entry or a swapped photo is simply there the next time a guest opens it. No second send, no new link.
Every design handles the story and the gallery differently, so the quickest way to judge yours is to put your own words and two of your own photos into one and look at it on a phone. The pricing page lists what each plan includes.
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