Why We Decided to Have a Small Wedding & 3 Tips To Make The Most Of It

Hello friends! I kept it quiet on here but, I got married last month, yeep! We had a small wedding and ceremony with our families, and it was the best day ever.

It got me thinking, that when we were planning our ceremony, once we’d decided we wanted a small wedding, it didn’t matter how many websites I scoured, I didn’t find any advice that applied to us, on how to make the most of the type of wedding we’d chosen and with no plans to go on a honeymoon. I was desperately trying to find a way to make it special beyond our ceremony. So, I thought I would put together a post about what I would have liked to know when we were organising our special day!

Why We Decided To Have a Small Wedding

We were engaged for two years before we got married this April. In that time we went back and forth between: do we want the whole shabang, a big wedding with a big venue and many guests, or do we want a smaller, intimate ceremony, only with family and friends? In general, I am a very indecisive person so you can imagine what that kind of thought process was like for me! One day I wanted the big wedding, the next a tiny ceremony… I just couldn’t decide for months.

In the end, we decided to have an elopement: it was the both of us, plus my parents and his parents. Who knew that the term micro-wedding actually referred to a wedding that has less than 50 guests!

We started preparing in October of 2022, and got married in April 2023. So, you can see that even though we picked an elopement, it still takes months for it to happen. We booked our registry office wedding date in October, and then had our appointment to give notice in December – in the UK you cannot book less than 3 months before your wedding date, so it was still a lengthy process.

The reasons we went for a small wedding are very simple: the cost, and the fact that our families live in different parts of the UK and France. A wedding can be very, very expensive, upwards of £10 000, and we simply couldn’t afford it as we are also trying to save to buy a house. Something had to give, and it was a big wedding. I don’t regret it all, we had the most fantastic day, but I would be lying if I said the cost hadn’t been a big factor in our decision. We’ve still spent a pretty penny on this small wedding – about £1000, without the rings! But not anywhere near what we would have spent on a big wedding.

And there was the matter of our families – my husband’s family are scattered around the UK, and my family is in France. Where would we have had our ceremony/reception? In France, and ask his family to travel? Or in the UK, and ask my family to travel? The joy of being an international couple… We probably would have upset anyone who couldn’t travel. So having only our parents there made sense. And this is how our small wedding came about!

3 Tips To Make The Most Of Your Small Wedding

Despite us settling on a small wedding, we knew we still wanted to find a way to make things special, so we got nice rings and a nice dress and suit! And then we had a sit down and think about how we could make it even more special, as we weren’t going to have a reception. Hence this post! I wanted to share the tips I gathered along the way to make your small wedding a day to remember.

Here’s 3 tips to make the most of your small wedding!

1. Hire a photographer

This is probably something that we thought about and decided on really quickly: we wanted a professional photographer to have some memories of our big day, even if it was an elopement! If there is one thing you need to spend money on for a small wedding, in my opinion, it’s that. Whether your day is big or small, you want to make sure that you have something to remember it by, and I don’t know anything better than pictures! We paid about £500 for two hours of the photographer’s time, for her to photograph our ceremony and have a photoshoot in the registry garden afterwards, and it was worth every penny for us. We were given all 400 photos she took on the day, and she’d done some light edits too. This is the best tip I can give you, hire a photographer to have memories to cherish.

2. Book a hotel room

Okay, hear me out on this one: with a small wedding like ours, we hadn’t planned a reception or any type of special afternoon/night to follow our ceremony. So, when we were thinking about how to make our first night as a married couple special, instead of just hanging out at home (which would have suited us fine, but it is our wedding after all!) and we saw how nice the hotel was where our family was staying, we decided to book a room too, to have a special first night! I think that it definitely added a little something to our day, thinking that we wouldn’t just go home as if nothing happened, but that instead we’d be in a little bubble of happiness for a little while longer. We loved treating ourselves to the most comfortable bed, the biggest shower and the best hotel dinner we’ve ever had! For me, this is definitely something to do if you’re planning a small wedding or elopement but have a tight budget, spending some money on a hotel room to make your special day last a little longer. It absolutely helped us make the most of our small wedding!

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3. Think up post-wedding plans

My last tip is to have some kind of plan in place for after you get married. If you’re having a small wedding because of a tight budget, like we did, chances are you haven’t got any honeymoon plans and are saving up to go away at a later date. We’re not going to have a honeymoon for a few months yet, even years, but we wanted our special time to go on after our ceremony and our hotel night. Since we both had a few days off work, we decided to plan a day out, just the two of us without our families, to regroup and enjoy our first days as newly weds. We had a day out in Leicester where we explored sites of interest, had a pub meal, and walked around the city, simply having a really nice time. It obviously was no match for a honeymoon away, but that day we had was lovely and a great addition to our small wedding plans!

Did you have, or are planning or having a small wedding?

Em ♥