Web Hosting for Wedding Planners

Short answer: a wedding planner’s site is the heaviest image portfolio in the professional services cluster, and almost every enquiry arrives with photographs attached. Storage, a CDN and a form that reliably handles attachments are what your hosting has to get right.

Looking for plans rather than guidance? Our web hosting plans start at £39 a year and renew at £39, with SSD storage, a CDN and daily backups included.

Real wedding galleries are your storage problem

A single wedding case study runs to twenty or thirty images, and they come from a professional photographer at full resolution, often eight megabytes each. Six case studies is easily a gigabyte before you have added anything else.

• Resize before uploading. Around 1600px wide is plenty and cuts file size dramatically without visible loss
• Use lazy loading, so a case study page loads as the visitor scrolls rather than all at once
• Serve through a CDN, which converts to modern formats and delivers from a location near the visitor
• Split galleries by wedding rather than one enormous page
• Remember WordPress creates several resized copies of each upload, so storage goes further than the originals suggest

Most couples browse in the evening on a phone, so this decides whether they see your work at all. Our plain English guide to Core Web Vitals covers how load speed is measured.

Check your photography licence

A practical point specific to this trade. Wedding photography is licensed to you rather than owned, and licences often carry credit requirements and sometimes time limits. Before you build an archive of images across your whole site, check what you are permitted to publish and for how long, because a takedown request after three years is worse than asking now.

Your enquiry form will carry photographs

Couples send inspiration images, venue photographs and Pinterest screenshots. Two consequences.

Check your upload limit. A default WordPress install often caps uploads below a couple of phone photographs, and a couple who hits an error usually gives up rather than emailing separately.

Test the form with an attachment as well as without. A form that delivers plain messages perfectly can fail on ones carrying files, because the message size exceeds a limit somewhere. Those are your qualified enquiries, and the failure is invisible: the form submits, the couple sees a confirmation, the email never arrives.

• Send form mail through authenticated SMTP rather than PHP mail
• Add SPF, DKIM and DMARC records to your domain
• Deliver to an address you check daily
• Test monthly, with and without an attachment

Our guides to contact forms not sending emails and SPF, DKIM and DMARC cover both. A single lost enquiry here is a four or five figure booking, so this is worth ten minutes.

January is your traffic spike

Engagements cluster around Christmas and New Year, so enquiries and site traffic peak sharply in January, often for weddings eighteen months out.

Two implications. Have caching and a CDN configured before Christmas rather than during your busiest month. And make sure your availability information is current before January, because that is when it gets read.

Email on your own domain, with room for images

Planning correspondence carries photographs, mood boards and supplier quotes, so mailbox storage matters more than for a text-based business. An address at your own domain also reads better when asking for a deposit.

Our email hosting plans include unlimited mailboxes with 10GB each, so enquiries and accounts can be separate without either filling up.

Backups protect the portfolio

Daily backups of files as well as database, and check the uploads folder is actually included, since some backup tools exclude it by default to keep backup files small. For you that folder is the business.

Register the domain in your own name with auto-renew set. Our complete guide to UK domain names covers registration and renewals.

What plan you actually need

Entry-level shared hosting with SSD storage, a CDN, free SSL and daily backups, with a storage allowance that has room to grow. Around £39 a year.

Check the renewal figure rather than the introductory rate. Our guide to cheap web hosting in the UK covers what should be included as standard.

Frequently asked questions

Why is my wedding portfolio so slow?

Full-resolution photographer files uploaded untouched. Resize to 1600px, use lazy loading, and serve through a CDN.

How much storage will I need?

More than most service businesses. Twenty to thirty images per wedding, at full resolution, plus WordPress’s own resized copies.

Can couples attach photographs to my enquiry form?

Yes, but check your upload limit and test the form with an attachment, since it can fail on those while working perfectly otherwise.

Are my galleries included in my backups?

Check. Some backup tools exclude the uploads folder by default, and that folder is your portfolio.

Explore more

Our guide to web hosting for professional services covers the shared requirements, and our guide to event planners covers the corporate side of the same trade.

Our hosting plans start at £39 a year, with a free trial if you want to test your own galleries for speed first.