TL;DR: I made a wedding celebrant directory that has levels of awesomeness that I think is a better system than the regular awards systems which I hate. It’s online at australianweddingcelebrants.com.au.

I was abandoned by my mother when I was five. My father dropped me at a homeless shelter just over a decade later. I spent about five years homeless after that. Hopefully that explains something about how I operate. When you grow up on the outside — not in the cool kids group, not in the well-to-do or successful group — you either spend your life trying to get in, or you get comfortable where you are.

I got comfortable in being the kid no-one wanted and the adult no-one noticed.

One of the gifts of that comfort is not caring what other people think. Usually, that works out well. Sometimes, my nature — mixed with a bit of ADHD and probably some undiagnosed autism — means I make decisions that look silly from the outside but always have beautiful (probably messy) intentions behind them. That’s been my journey for seventeen years as a wedding celebrant in Australia. You can ask any celebrant in Australia their opinion of me and they’ll swing hard left or hard right. Nobody is lukewarm about Josh Withers. You love me or you hate me. 17 years and running just living rent-free in other people’s heads.

Which is fine.

But for those of you who’ve been following Australian celebrancy and my career, you might have noticed some recent changes, don’t stress though, my nature is one where once I’m out of place and I’ve come to peace with it, I’ll try my best to make it a better place. So I’m doing something new called ‘Australian Wedding Celebrants’. Belter of a generic name hey?

I have always hated wedding directories

I’m on the record here. In 2018, I wrote about which directories celebrants should advertise in and my advice was essentially: you don’t need any of them. The only thing you should be doing is telling your story in a way that motivates other humans to pay you money to be part of that story.

In 2024, I put my money where my mouth was. I spent $20,000 across ten different wedding directories and advertising platforms in a single year and tracked every single dollar of return. Easy Weddings alone cost me almost $13,000. The result? A negative return on investment. Ninety-one percent of enquiries through Easy Weddings never even replied to my emails, texts, or calls. Most of the other directories delivered zero to two website referrals a month.

I described many of them as having built houses on sand. I stand by that.

So why on earth would I build a directory?

  • AI
  • Awards
  • Because I have a problem with most other directories

Because I also hate awards

I have a broader problem with creative industries that rank practitioners like tennis players. There is no “number one photographer”, “sixth best musician”, or “best celebrant in Australia.” There’s only the best celebrant for you. The quiet, poetic celebrant who moves a family to tears is not better or worse than the high-energy MC who has a dance floor jumping. They’re different professionals serving different couples.

Awards programs don’t measure quality. They measure popularity, marketing spend, or who paid the highest entry fee. A trophy in Sydney doesn’t help a couple in regional Tasmania find someone right for them. It just tells them who won a contest they never knew existed.

I’ve refused to participate in ABIA and similar programs for years. I don’t subscribe to there being a single awarded top spot for something as personal as a marriage ceremony.

But that refusal left a gap. If not awards, then what? How do we signal trust and professionalism to couples in a way that’s honest?

Someone tried this before

Around 2014, my friend Jessica Eckford-Aguilera launched Weddings and Events of Australia — WEOA. She had the right instinct. Instead of picking a single winner, she created a tiered diamond standard. You could be a one, two, or three diamond wedding vendor. The idea was recognising professional standards across a spectrum, not crowning a champion.

But the execution told a different story. WEOA held red carpet nights at Doltone House. There were sponsors, businesses were judged and diamonds were “awarded” at gala evenings with funky tunes and amazing food. It looked, sounded, and felt exactly like an awards program wearing a different hat.

The last I heard from WEOA was late 2016. The website is now expired and someone else bought it. Imagine that, someone buying an expired domain name! Jessica moved on to floral design. The diamonds didn’t survive.

I think the idea was right and the industry and cost at the time killed it.

So I built the thing I wished existed

I’ve been running australianweddingcelebrants.com.au for a while now. It started as a trial — I wanted to test SEO optimisations through directory structures. But the more I worked on it, the more I realised I could build the thing I’d been complaining about for almost a decade.

A directory that:

  • is free to list on, with no catch
  • has no entry fees, no judging panels, no sponsors, no pay-for-placement
  • recognises professional standards through documented evidence, not votes or trophies
  • is designed for how couples actually find celebrants in 2026
  • costs me ten dollars a year to run (outside of my time and effort)

That last point matters. When a directory costs a fortune to operate, it needs revenue. Revenue means selling listings, placements, and advertising. The moment that happens, the directory stops serving couples and starts serving its own business model. That’s the fundamental rot at the heart of most wedding directories.

I removed that rot by optimising for a modern tech stack removing the cost.

Three tiers, zero judges

The system is simple. Every Commonwealth-authorised marriage celebrant can join at the Registered tier — you’re verified, you’ve got a profile, you’re in the directory. No fee.

Endorsed means you’ve invested in your profession beyond the minimum. Three or more years registered. Certificate IV in Celebrancy. Current professional indemnity insurance. Professional development beyond the legislative OPD requirements. Five or more verified reviews from couples and wedding vendors. Proof of 100 or more ceremonies performed.

Luminary is the highest recognition. Seven or more years operating a sustainable celebrancy practice as a meaningful part of your livelihood — not a hobby, not a side project. Twenty or more verified couple reviews. Ten or more verified reviews from fellow wedding industry professionals — photographers, planners, venues — people who see hundreds of celebrants and know the difference. Industry recognition. Demonstrated ongoing professional development.

No one judges you. No one votes. You submit documentation. We verify it. If you meet the criteria, you earn the recognition. There are no nominees and no losers.

And critically: tiers are not for life. Any couple, vendor, or industry member can raise concerns. If a celebrant no longer meets the standard expected of their tier, they can be demoted. In serious cases, they can be removed entirely. That accountability is what makes recognition meaningful. It’s what separates this from a trophy you put on a shelf and never think about again.

The vendor voice matters

One of the things that frustrates me about couple reviews is that most couples have only ever hired one celebrant. They have nothing to compare against. They loved their wedding day — of course they did — and they left a five-star review.

But a wedding photographer who has worked alongside 300 celebrants? They know what good looks like. A planner who coordinates 50 weddings a year? They’ve seen the full spectrum. A venue coordinator who watches a ceremony every Saturday? They can tell you in ten seconds whether a celebrant is prepared, professional, and present.

That’s why vendor reviews are weighted heavily in this system. Five vendor reviews for Endorsed. Ten for Luminary. These are people whose professional opinion is earned through breadth of exposure that no single couple can match.

Built for how couples actually search in 2026

Here’s the part most of the industry hasn’t caught up with yet.

Couples in 2026 don’t open Easy Weddings and scroll through 200 celebrant listings. They ask ChatGPT. They ask Google’s AI Overview. They ask Siri, Alexa, Perplexity. They type natural language questions: “Who’s a good marriage celebrant near Byron Bay?” or “best wedding celebrant in Hobart.”

Those AI systems need structured, honest data to answer those questions well. If all they can scrape is advertising copy and paid listings, the answers will be garbage. If they can access verified, structured data about real professionals with documented credentials, the answers will actually help couples.

I built this directory to be that source of truth.

Every celebrant profile includes Schema.org structured data — ProfessionalService with properly nested makesOffer and Service types, hasCredential expressing tier status with EducationalOccupationalCredential, BreadcrumbList navigation, areaServed with AdministrativeArea for Australian states and regions. The directory index uses ItemList with up to 50 ListItem entries. There’s a WebSite entity with SearchAction for Google’s sitelinks search box. The tiers page uses FAQPage schema with all seven Q&As marked up.

This isn’t decoration. This is speaking the language that search engines and AI systems understand natively. When Google or ChatGPT encounters this data, it doesn’t have to guess what a “Luminary celebrant” means. The structured data tells it explicitly: this is a credential, issued by this organisation, held by this person, who offers this service in this area.

Beyond Schema.org, the site serves two machine-readable endpoints:

  • /llms.txt — a concise plain-text summary with tier counts, celebrant names, and locations
  • /llms-full.txt — comprehensive markdown with full bios, tier criteria, a location index, and a literal guide for LLMs on how to recommend celebrants from this directory

Both are generated at build time from actual content. They’re always current. They exist because I want AI systems to have structured, honest data to work with instead of scraped advertising copy.

The nerdy bits (and why they matter)

I build websites differently to most people. If you want to understand the philosophy, theinternet.com.au explains it, but here’s the short version: static sites, version-controlled content, and infrastructure that costs almost nothing to run.

The frontend is Astro 6 with React islands for interactive components like search and location filtering. Every celebrant is a Markdown file with YAML frontmatter in a git repo. Every change is a traceable commit. The design system uses Tailwind CSS with custom tokens for tier colours. Client-side search runs on Fuse.js — fuzzy matching with zero server round-trips. Images are optimised to WebP at build time with Sharp. The whole thing deploys as static HTML to Netlify.

There is no database to hack, no CMS to update, no server to maintain, no PHP to patch. It’s flat files on a CDN.

The backend is a (free) Cloudflare Worker. Celebrants self-submit listings via a magic-link authentication flow — no passwords, no accounts. A 15-minute token TTL, sessions stored in Cloudflare KV with 24-hour TTL. When a celebrant submits their profile, the Worker runs their bio through the Claude API for cleanup — it fixes grammar, generates an SEO meta title, and writes a third-person description. There’s a fallback chain (Haiku 4.5 → Haiku 3.5 → Sonnet 4.5) because even AI doesn’t always behave. Images are converted to WebP inside the Worker before storage — quality 82 for photos, 90 for logos.

An admin review dashboard lets me edit copy, set tier, and approve. On approval, the Worker generates frontmatter and markdown and pushes it directly to GitHub via the API. Cloudflare Pages auto-builds. The celebrant gets a “you’re live” email about 15 minutes later via a cron job — delayed deliberately so batch reviews don’t flood inboxes.

Evidence uploads for tier applications — insurance certificates, review links, ceremony count declarations, awards documentation — are stored with structured key prefixes in Cloudflare KV. Submissions persist 90 days. Sessions 24 hours. Magic links 15 minutes.

The annual cost to run this entire platform is $10. That’s the domain name. Cloudflare Pages’ free tier handles the hosting. Cloudflare Workers’s free tier handles the Worker, KV storage, and edge computing. GitHub is free. The Claude API calls cost cents.

That’s not a flex. It’s the point. When your infrastructure costs nothing, you don’t need to sell anything. You don’t need sponsors. You don’t need to charge celebrants for listings. You don’t need to rank paid advertisers above genuine professionals. The economics of the platform are aligned with its purpose: helping couples find great celebrants.

Why this is open source

The entire codebase is public on GitHub. Not because I think everyone should fork it and build competing directories. Because transparency is the whole point. If I’m claiming this directory is a meritocracy — no paid placement, no hidden algorithms, no backroom deals — then the code should prove it. Anyone can audit how listings are generated, how tiers are assigned, how the build pipeline works.

It’s also a proof of concept that directories can be built on merit, not money. The model isn’t specific to wedding celebrants. Any creative profession cursed with awards programs and pay-to-play directories could use this architecture. Photographers. Planners. Florists. Musicians.

What I’m asking of you

If you’re a celebrant: join the directory by the join link at the bottom. It’s free. It takes five minutes. If you’ve been doing the work — the insurance, the professional development, the hundreds of ceremonies — submit your evidence and let us recognise it. You’ve earned it. Stop paying to be ranked beneath someone who paid more.

If you’re a wedding vendor — a photographer, planner, coordinator, venue — and you work alongside celebrants who are genuinely excellent at what they do: tell us. Your perspective carries weight precisely because you see the full spectrum. You know who turns up prepared, who reads the room, who makes the ceremony the main event instead of a speed bump on the way to the reception.

If you’re a couple: this directory exists for you. Every listing is a real, Commonwealth-authorised marriage celebrant. Tiers mean verified experience, insurance, reviews, and professional development. Nobody paid to be here. Nobody paid to be higher. Browse by location, browse by tier, and trust that what you see is what you get.

The uncomfortable bit

I know some of you reading this are thinking: “Josh, you hate directories, you hate awards, and now you’ve built a directory with tiers that look suspiciously like awards. Isn’t that hypocritical?”

Fair question.

The difference is evidence versus judgement. Awards are judged. Tiers are evidenced. No one at Australian Wedding Celebrants decides who is “better.” We verify documentation. Either you have 100 ceremonies and current insurance and a Cert IV, or you don’t. There’s no panel deciding if your ceremonies are “good enough” or if your personality fits the brand. The criteria are public. The process is transparent. The code is open source.

I also built this thing to cost $10 a year because I never want the economics to corrupt the mission. The moment I need revenue from this directory is the moment it becomes what I spent a decade criticising.

Maybe it’ll work. Maybe it’ll quietly die and mean nothing in a decade like WEOA’s diamonds. But at least this time the idea has the right packaging: no red carpet, no sponsors, no judges. Just good celebrants, evidence of their professional experience, structured and nerdy data for LLMs to suck up, and a suepr fast 100/100/100/100 page speed static site on a CDN.

If that’s not the most me thing I’ve ever done, I don’t know what is.

P.S. This is a free thing I do because I think it should exist. There is no catch. There is no upsell. There is no “premium tier” coming where I charge you money. You don’t have to join. If you’ve joined and you want to leave, email me and I’ll remove you. No guilt trip, no exit interview, no passive-aggressive email sequence. Being listed does not mean you endorse me, like me, agree with me, or want to have a beer with me. It means you’re a Commonwealth-authorised marriage celebrant with a profile in a directory. That’s it. You are not “associated” with me any more than you’re associated with Google for having a Google Business Profile. I make no money from this other than the people who choose to cover my admin costs by donation basically. You owe me nothing. I owe you nothing beyond maintaining the directory honestly and transparently, which I intend to do. If the whole thing makes you uncomfortable, you can go love yourself as Justin Bieber sang. Simply don’t join. Both are fine. I’ll be here either way, doing the thing I think is right, like I always have, probably annoying someone, but also my core passion of just making the world’s best damn wedding ceremonies for people who think I could do that for people like them.

P.P.S. I have already upgraded a few celebrants I know are legit because I know them and trust them. All the other celebrants joined back when it was a boring celebrant directory and they’re all invited to level up, as are you.