Improving our homepage search

We love to be able to make improvements to our wedding list service in response to customer suggestions. We recently received an email from one of our customers in the US, who had an idea regarding the search facility on our homepage that lets your guests go directly to your registry by entering your surname and the date of your wedding.

She’d found that if, in a hurry, you enter the full name of one of the happy couple (instead of just their surname), the site wouldn’t be able to find the registry you’re looking for. You might then start to doubt the wedding date you’d entered!

We thought this was a really good point — so we’ve now improved our homepage search to respond much more flexibly to the name that’s entered.

As long as the wedding date you enter is correct, the site will now take you directly to your registry whether you enter a surname, both surnames, a full name or even just a first name. In fact, there’s actually now 46 different combinations that we’ve tried to account for!

If there are two or more couples with the same wedding date whose names match what you’ve entered, you’ll be able to choose the registry you’re looking for. If there’s only one matching registry, we’ll take you straight to it.

To try to keep things simple for your guests, we still ask for the surname of either partner — but we’ll do our best to find the couple you mean.

And don’t forget, if your wedding celebration is taking place on a different date from your actual ceremony, just let us know both dates and we’ll make sure the search works properly for both.

Our customers in the UK and Europe can request a set of customised registry cards, so your guests can go straight to your wedding list without needing to visit our homepage or search. And many couples choose to link directly to their registry pages from their own wedding website — but our search nonetheless gets used hundreds of times every day, so we’re really pleased to be able to make it work better!