How to make a digital wedding invitation

Decide the tone before you look at designs

Every invitation carries the same facts, but a barn in Somerset and a hotel ballroom do not want the same voice. Agree on three words before you open the catalogue — "warm, relaxed, green" or "formal, classic, black tie" — and use them as a filter. It saves the afternoon otherwise lost to scrolling through designs that are lovely and wrong.

Those three words decide more than the colours. They set how you address people, whether you write "we would be delighted" or "we would love you there", and whether the music behind the invitation is a string quartet or something you actually dance to.

Put in everything a guest needs, and nothing else

The non-negotiables: both names, the date with the day of the week, the start time, the venue name, the full address, and a map link. If the day has several parts — ceremony, reception, evening guests — give each one its own line with its own time rather than burying them in a paragraph.

Resist the urge to put the address on the cover. On a phone the cover has room for a date and a place name; everything else belongs below, where there is space to read it. Have someone who is not marrying you check the date against a calendar. Getting the day of the week wrong is the single most common mistake, and it is invisible to the people who wrote it.

• Both names, spelled and ordered the way you want them read aloud
• Date, day of the week and start time — checked against a calendar
• Venue name, full address and a working map link
• Dress code, parking, and whether children are invited

Ask for the reply on the invitation itself

The moment a guest has to leave the invitation to reply — open their email, find your number, remember later — you have lost a proportion of them. A reply form on the page turns a decision into one tap while they are still looking at it.

Ask for the number of people at the same time. "Attending" from a couple with two children is four seats, and finding that out three weeks later, one message at a time, is how catering numbers go wrong.

Send the link, then leave it alone

One link, sent in the message app people already read. It opens in the browser with no app to install and no account to make — which matters more than it sounds when a quarter of your guest list is over seventy.

After it is out, do not keep editing the wording. Fix a wrong time immediately, but resist rewriting the welcome line: guests who already opened it will not look again, and you will end up with two versions of the truth in circulation.

Frequently asked

How far in advance should a digital invitation go out?

The same as a printed one: six to eight weeks for a local wedding, three months or more if guests are travelling or it falls in a holiday period. Being digital saves the printing time, not the time your guests need to book.

Do older guests manage with a digital invitation?

Usually yes, provided the link opens straight in the browser with nothing to install and no sign-up. The failure is almost never age — it is invitations that demand an account before showing anything.