The announcement of a royal wedding between Prince William and Kate Middleton was barely hours old before the country started looking to cash in on the event yesterday.

The media revealed that the wedding ring will be fashioned from Welsh gold, that souvenir shops are designing commemorative plates and that the wedding will be a boost to British tourism.
Although royal weddings are steeped in tradition, the modern couple may want to get some ideas at least for their ceremony and honeymoon online. Our data shows that the most popular wedding websites in the last month were Hitched.co.uk, You & Your Wedding and UK Wedding Venues.

Using the Mosaic segmentation system, we can home in on the websites which are visited by the Alpha Territory group, the wealthiest and most affluent group which represents the population closest in demographics to the royal couple.

There is quite a bit of movement within the top websites when ranked according to the preferences of the UK’s richest group. In particular, Dessy Creations has jumped from the fourth most popular website overall, to being the second most visited wedding website by the Alpha Territory group. In fact, Dessy Creations specialises in bridesmaids dresses rather than wedding dresses, which may say something about Alpha Territory females -always the bridesmaid but never the bride!
By far the biggest wedding website online however is Hitched.co.uk with 9.44% of all UK Internet visits to the wedding category and 7.42% of the Alpha Territory visits to the category. Looking at the top search terms which drive traffic to the website, there is quite a variety of terms from dresses to venues to speeches.

Using our new search sequence tool, we can see what people are searching before and after searching for wedding dresses. Unsurprisingly, cakes, bridesmaid dresses and rings are all searched for before (left column) or after (right column) the wedding dresses.

One of the more unexpected insights from the search sequence is the prominence of designer wedding dresses as the number one search term to occur after searching for wedding dresses. After searching for ‘wedding dresses’ 1.05% of searchers looked for ‘designer wedding dresses’ with their next five searches. There has already been a lot of speculation about which designer will create Miss Middleton’s dress, and no doubt once the designer is revealed there will be a surge of traffic to their website. We’ll be monitoring the progression online as further details are announced.
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