By Pash, founder of Adorely · Updated September 17, 2026 · 7 min read
An anniversary website is one web page made for one couple: photos from the years since the wedding, a song attached to a particular one of them, and whatever you want to say, at a link you send on the morning. It takes an evening to build with no code and no design experience. Pick a design, add twelve to twenty photos, write your part, and decide one thing before any of it: whether the page is from you alone or from everybody.
That decision is the whole article, and it is the one thing a birthday page never has to work out. A birthday is a group card by default. An anniversary belongs to two people, and thirty relatives writing on it can turn something private into a committee. The year decides which kind you are making. Below is the process in order, where the photographs actually are, and the honest alternatives, because for a third anniversary a shared album is often the right answer.
Years one through ten are usually one voice. The page is a letter with pictures, nobody else writes on it, and adding your mother-in-law changes what you are able to say. Twenty five, forty and fifty go the other way: at those years the marriage belongs to a whole family, the people who were at the wedding are still around, and a page with eighteen voices on it is the gift. Pick one now, because it decides the design, the photos and the tone.
Thirty seconds, before you open anything. "Nine years and nobody has ever written any of it down." "Proof to my parents that the four of us noticed what they built." "The year we both want to forget, told properly." Everything after this gets easier, and skipping it is how people end up with an attractive page that is about marriage in general rather than about this marriage.
They are the most-seen pictures in any marriage. Everybody at the wedding has them, they have been framed, posted and printed, and another pass through them tells the couple nothing new. Start at the week after and work forward: the first apartment, the car that kept breaking, the hospital corridor, the kitchen in the house before this one. Two or three wedding frames at the end, as punctuation.
Most couples have a gap between the wedding album and the arrival of phone cameras, and for a fiftieth that gap is thirty years long. Those pictures exist in boxes at their parents house, in a sibling drawer, on an old hard drive, in your own mother album. Ask three people a week out and scan on a phone. This step takes longer than building the page and it is the part that makes people cry.
Look through the designs →The design sets the mood and the mood tells you which photos belong. An elegant, quiet page wants the domestic ones, the unposed ones, the ones taken at eleven at night. A bright one wants the ridiculous holiday pictures and the kids mid-shout. Choosing the other way around leaves you with forty photos and no idea which twelve of them belong together.
Otherwise it gets written at midnight in four rushed lines under all the work you did on everything else. Anchor it to one year rather than to the marriage, because every true sentence about a long relationship is also a sentence anybody could have written. "The eight months in 2021" is yours. "You have always been my rock" belongs to a card in a drugstore.
Not the family group thread, which everyone reads and nobody answers. Eight to twelve people messaged individually, each told they are one of a short list and it takes two minutes. For an anniversary, weight the list toward people who were there at the start: the brother who drove them to the airport, the friend who introduced them, the neighbor from the first apartment.
A blank box asking for an anniversary message produces congratulations and nothing else. Ask for one thing instead: something you remember about them in the first year, or the moment you knew it was working. A question gets an answer in four minutes from somebody who would have taken a week to write a paragraph, and the answers are the part the couple has never heard.
The first dance song is the wedding again, and they have heard it at every anniversary since. The better choice is whatever was playing in the apartment the year they were broke, or the album that was on in the car for an entire summer with the kids in the back. Music does the work no amount of writing does, and the right one lands before a word has been read.
A birthday page can ambush somebody. An anniversary cannot, because both of them have known the date for years and there are probably dinner plans already. Use that. Send the link in the morning so it is read properly on a phone in bed, or hold it and open it on a laptop together after dinner. What does not work is handing it over in a restaurant while a waiter is standing there.
Building is an evening. Getting photographs out of other people takes days, and scanning takes an afternoon nobody budgets for. If you are reading this the night before, you can still do the one-voice version tonight with what is on your phone, and it will be good. If there is any runway, spend it on the asking rather than on the page.
A shared album costs nothing, takes ten minutes, and is genuinely right for a third anniversary. A printed photo book is better than any website for a fiftieth, because the people in that room want an object on a table rather than a link. A slideshow works if there is a dinner with a screen. A page earns its place when there are messages from other people on it, or when the two of them are apart on the day.
On Adorely you build the whole page and see exactly how it looks before you decide, then pay once per page when you publish it. There is no subscription and no second charge. Build it first, look at it on your phone the way they will, and only then decide whether it is worth sending. If it is not, you have lost an evening and gained a folder of scanned photographs, which is not nothing.
Start an anniversary page →Decide whether the page is from you alone or from everybody, pick a design, add twelve to twenty photos from the years after the wedding rather than from the wedding itself, write your own message first, and add a song tied to a specific year. Building takes an evening. Collecting photos and messages from other people takes about three days.
It depends on the year. For years one through ten, one voice is usually better, and extra contributors change what you are able to say. For a twenty fifth, fortieth or fiftieth, the opposite is true: the marriage belongs to a whole family by then, and eighteen messages from people who were at the wedding are the actual gift.
The years after the wedding, which for most couples are the least photographed years they have. The first apartment, the old car, the kitchen in the previous house, the children when they were small. Keep two or three wedding frames for punctuation. Everyone has already seen the wedding album more times than anything else.
An evening on your own. Three days end to end if you want photographs and messages from other people, because scanning old pictures takes an unbudgeted afternoon and adults do not answer the first message. If it is tomorrow, build the one-voice version tonight with what is on your phone.
Photos, your words, their song, and wishes from everyone, on one beautiful page, shared with one link.
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