The Knot | Wedding Websites
Modern website editor tools for The Knot
Overview
The Knot offers a robust suite of wedding planning tools for engaged couples. Couples most often know and discover The Knot through the free wedding websites feature, citing this as the reason they visited the platform.
When I did a competitive audit back in 2022 I realized that The Knot’s offering had fallen way behind industry standards. I put together a data driven, business impact focused narrative to align stakeholders on the need for innovation in such an important part of The Knot's funnel.
The feature may be free, but users who set up a website are shown to have significantly higher interaction with our Registry and Paper offerings, a direct correlation to revenue.
This project resulted in a 12% increase in engagement, and 4% higher adoption over a five week period. ADD REVENUE METRICS
We can also assume that the increase we see for adoption is only a fraction of the true impact, as adoption is usually measured after 9 months.
My contributions
Product strategy
Product design
Usability research
The team
1x Product manager
1x Engineering manager
1x Superstar engineer
1x Data analyst
1x UX Researcher
Many stakeholders
Year
2025
Process
What we built & how
Although there were many shortcomings across the wedding websites feature, the two that were the most impactful were the editor and the layout.
The editor had very inefficient and dated UX, but beneath that surface, much of the necessary functionality was there. Knowing that we had very limited engineering resources, we identified how we could make the most impact — get the ‘biggest bang for our buck’.
Although the UI update was a bit less elegant than we wanted, we prioritized functionality and a cleaner workflow.
Similarly, we saw that our competitors had great flexibility with how couples could utilize photographs on their site. In contrast, The Knot’s site layout required all users to upload a 3x5 banner photo. Many couples reached out to us, surely there must be an option to use vertical photos from their engagement photoshoot?
We finally gave those couples the option. Again, using lean and scrappy methods, we created a vertical photo banner layout website option. Huge shoutout to my superstar developer, Parker, who single handedly made this project possible.
Challenges along the way
This project took years to put in motion. Aligning stakeholders was only the first step.
The business side of the house began to strategize around monetizing wedding websites. While busy with development, my incredible PM and I partnered to make a well researched and clear case conveying why this strategy was not viable. Ultimately, we were able to align on keeping wedding websites free.
There were many development hiccups along the way, but keeping close track of our development teams progress on each ticket and assigning tickets accordingly with each team members skillset, we were able to meet our deadlines and deliver on a truly impactful release.
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Outcome
This launch was recognized with a nomination for the Digiday Best Digital Product Innovation award, and it won the silver award from The Drum for Consumer Tech. We also saw incredible feedback and engagement from our community on social media and within the app.
The tool exceeded our metric for success with a .7% increase of new users who return within 7 days (R7), and 3000 new R7 users weekly (on pace to exceed goal of 58k incremental return visitors annually by over 2x).
There are still many more improvements that can be made to Budget Advisor, primarily a deeper connection between this tool and the Marketplace. Deepening this connection will make it easier for couples to connect their budget estimation work with next steps in booking vendors — and generate major revenue for the business.