Show, hide and reorder the sections

An invitation has one job: tell a guest who is getting married, when, where, and how to reply. Everything else on the page sits between them and that reply. You can switch any part of the invitation off and drag what remains into the order you want, so the question worth asking is not which sections look nice, but which ones have earned a place above the reply button.

The four things a guest needs, in the order they need them

A guest opening your link is doing a small piece of admin. They want to know whose wedding it is, which day, where it is, and whether they have to answer now. Give them those four and they close the tab satisfied. Delay any of them and they message you instead, usually at an inconvenient hour.

The order that works is the order of those questions.

• Who and when. Names and the date at the very top, before anyone scrolls. This is the hero, and it should not have to share the screen with anything.
• Where. The venue and the map. A guest deciding whether they can come is really deciding about travel, a hotel, a babysitter, a day of leave.
• What happens, and over how many days. The schedule, if there is more than one ceremony or event. If your celebration is one ceremony in one place, this collapses into the hero and the section can come off.
• The reply. As high as you can manage, and certainly above the photographs.

Everything after that is generosity: the story, the gallery, the countdown, the footer. They are lovely, and they are not what the page is for.

What each extra section costs on a phone

Your guests are not reading this at a desk. The link arrives in a chat thread and gets opened one-handed, somewhere between other things. Scroll depth is not free. A section that takes three swipes to get past is three swipes of somebody who was only half committed to replying today.

There is no drop-off curve to point at, and inventing one would not help you. Count instead. Open the page on the handset in your pocket and swipe from your names to the reply button. More than two or three swipes and some section in between is not paying its rent. That ceiling is set by eye rather than measured, so treat a high count as a prompt to look again, not a verdict.

The photo gallery is usually the culprit. A dozen photographs is a long stretch of scrolling, and they sit there being beautiful while the person who needed to reply loses interest. The story is the second culprit, normally because it was written to be read rather than skimmed.

Where the story, the gallery and the countdown belong

Below the reply, almost always. Not because they do not matter, but because of who wants them. The guests who want to read how you met will scroll to find it. The guests who only need the date will not scroll past it. Putting the story underneath serves both. Putting it on top serves one.

There are exceptions, and they are worth naming.

• The countdown works near the top when the date is close, because “in nine days” is a different fact from “the fourteenth”. On a long engagement it reads in the hundreds, which is not anticipation, and it is better hidden until nearer the time.
• The gallery earns a high position at one moment: after the wedding, when people reopen the link for the photographs rather than the details. That is when to hide the countdown, move the gallery up, and let the invitation become a keepsake.
• The schedule belongs above the reply whenever a guest has to book something around it. Several days, an early ceremony, anything that changes their travel.
• The story can go higher when the invitation is reaching people who do not know you both. One side’s extended family, colleagues, the friends your partner has never met. For a list of thirty people who were there for most of it, it is padding.

What to cut for a small or informal wedding

For a register office morning, a garden lunch, a second wedding, the honest section list is short: the names and date, the venue and map, the reply, the footer. A page that could have been read in ten seconds should be. Cut the countdown if the date could still move, since a ticking clock announces a certainty you do not have yet. Cut the story if the people receiving it lived through it. Cut the gallery if everyone on the list has seen those photographs this month.

There is also a case where the answer is that you want something else entirely. If what you need is pages of detail, hotel blocks, travel advice, a gift list, an FAQ for guests flying in, a full archive of photographs, then you want a wedding website, and an invitation with more sections switched on is not a substitute for one. An invitation is a single page that asks for a reply. If your wedding needs a reference site, build one, and let the invitation do the one job it is good at.

Reordering is an editorial decision, not a design one

The section list looks like a styling tool. It is not. Dragging the story above the venue changes nothing about how the page looks. It changes what a guest learns first, which is the same kind of choice as deciding which sentence opens a letter.

So make it the way an editor would. Decide what the page is for this week. Before the wedding it is for collecting replies, so the reply goes high and the ornament goes low. In the fortnight when you are chasing the last stragglers, the page has one purpose, and every section stacked on top of the reply is queueing in front of it. Your RSVP list will tell you which of those weeks you are in. After the wedding, the order inverts.

Then read the running order back as if it were a sentence: names, date, place, reply. If it reads like a sentence, it is right. If reading it back makes you say “and then, for some reason, twelve photographs”, you have your answer.

You are also allowed to change your mind. Guests keep the same link, so reordering after you have sent the invitation does not mean resending anything. The order you chose in a hurry the night you built it is not the order you have to live with.

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