A website for your celebrant work
A couple or a family isn't buying a service. They're choosing a person. That is the whole job of a celebrant's website: to sound like you, calmly, so the right people recognise you and get in touch. This page is our honest offer to celebrants working in New Zealand. A proper website, written for you, for a one-off price, owned outright in your own name, with nothing monthly behind it, ever.
Last updated July 2026
The front doorA list gives them your name. Your page is where they choose you.
There are good places to be listed, and they all matter. Independent marriage and civil union celebrants are appointed by the Registrar-General and published in a list the public can search by area. Funeral directors keep their own lists and recommend celebrants they trust to families. Word of mouth does the rest. None of that is going anywhere, and none of it is in competition with a website.
But a list gives someone a name and a town. It doesn't tell them what you're like in a room. Search a town and the word celebrant and what mostly comes back is celebrants' own websites, which is where the actual choosing happens. Someone handed your name will look you up before they email you. Either they find a page that sounds like you, or they find a row in a directory and a phone number and no reason to pick you over the next name down.
So the site isn't a sales pitch, and we wouldn't write you one. It's a quiet, well-made page that says how you work and what a ceremony with you feels like, so the people you'd want to work with recognise themselves in it and the ones who wouldn't suit you move on. That's a good day's work for a website.
And the honest other side: if your year is already full through funeral directors and word of mouth, and you're turning work away, you may not need us at all. We'd rather say that here than waste your evening.
What a celebrant's website actually needs
Not much, done well. Who you are, in your own voice. How you work, from the first conversation through to the day itself. The kinds of ceremonies you take, and the area you cover. What people can expect of you, and one clear way to get hold of you. Fees published if you want them published, left off if you'd rather talk first. That's a site.
Many celebrants hold two very different kinds of work in one practice. A wedding is one of the happiest days of someone's life. A funeral is the worst week of someone's. One website can carry both, but only if the writing is done with care: separate paths, different pacing, and none of the wedding brightness bleeding onto the page a grieving family lands on. We write it that way on purpose, and you see every word before anything goes live.
For the funeral side especially, we design the way we design everything. Short sentences. One decision at a time. Big enough to read on a phone late at night. Nothing flashing, nothing counting down, nothing selling. Our design lens comes from lived experience in the community and disability sector, where a page has to work on someone's worst day or it doesn't work at all. That's the house standard here, not an extra you pay for.
What it doesn't need: a booking platform, a monthly plan, a photo gallery that takes ten seconds to load, or a chat widget nobody answers. We build small, fast, plain sites on purpose. They cost almost nothing to keep online, which is why hosting is free.
A personal brand shouldn't be rented
For a celebrant, the business is the person. Your name is the whole product, and your reputation is built one ceremony at a time over years. So it matters where that name lives. A profile on someone else's platform is rented shelf space: the fees change, the terms change, the order you appear in changes, and every kind word you earned sits on their side of the fence.
Ours is built the other way round. The domain is registered in your name, never ours, and it's yours to move whenever you like. Hosting is free, so there's no subscription quietly lapsing in a slow season. The whole site can be exported free at any time, so you're not locked to us either. That's what the name means: in New Zealand, freehold is land you own outright, not a tenancy on it.
A page that ages with your practice
To see what this looks like built, we made a fictional site for a celebrant: Marnie Ashcroft, celebrant. Every real build starts from your own world, not from that one.
The site is finished on the day it goes live. That is the honest premise of the whole offer: it is complete, it says who you are and how you work, and it can stay exactly as it is for as long as you like, free, forever. Hosting costs you nothing, nothing renews, and a year in which you change nothing costs nothing at all.
It can also grow, because we stay behind it. When something changes, you email us, we draft the change and send it back for you to read, and it goes on the site once you have said yes. A batch of changes is $20, so it pays to send a few at once, and a straightforward change can usually be done quickly. You never have to work on the site yourself, and nothing is published that you haven't approved. Over a few years that adds up to something. A ceremony added to your story as your practice grows, only ever with the couple's or the family's permission. A new kind of ceremony on the page the season you start taking them. Your fees and your availability kept true, so nobody enquires about a month you're already booked. The page ageing with you, instead of freezing at the year it was built.
Every build can also include a site assistant, a quiet way for a visitor to ask a question and get an answer drawn from the site's own words, nothing invented. It's included in the price and switched on only if you want it. All of it stays yours either way: the domain in your name, nothing monthly, and the whole site exportable free at any time.
One flat price, and nothing monthly behind it
Our standard price is $800, once. That's the whole build: a full multi-page site, written and designed for you, not a template with your name dropped into it. No plan, no monthly fee, no renewal that creeps up in year three.
There is also a $400 community rate, and we'd rather tell you it exists than let you assume it doesn't. It's for people where $800 would genuinely be a stretch: a celebrant just starting out, or someone taking a handful of ceremonies a year alongside other work. The test is one question, could you comfortably pay $800? If the honest answer is yes, the standard rate is the fair one, and paying it is part of what keeps the other rate open for someone else. Same site, same care, same ownership at either rate, by rule. Here's how we make that call.
The only cost we don't carry: your domain name, about $65 a year, because it has to be registered in your name and not ours. That's the deed. Changes later are $20 for a batch of edits, whenever you actually want one, and a year where nothing changes costs nothing. Hosting is free, export is free, and there is nothing monthly, ever.
Asked and answered, plainly
The sums behind the price
What the whole market charges, honestly mapped: what a website really costs in New Zealand. Why owning beats renting when your name is the business: owning vs renting your website. Whether the $400 rate applies to you: who qualifies for the community rate. The whole process from first email to handover: how it works.
Tell us about your work in a sentence
Where you are, the kinds of ceremonies you take, and what you have now, even if that's a Facebook page or nothing at all. We'll be straight about whether we can help and what it would cost.