How to send wedding invitations online

The same way, with one difference: keep the message short. SMS splits long messages into parts and some phones reorder them, so write a single line — who it is from, who it is for — and then the link on its own. On iPhone, iMessage will draw a preview card the same way WhatsApp does; on plain SMS, guests see the address as text, which is why the line above it matters more here than anywhere else.

Text is the right channel for the guests who never open email and do not use WhatsApp, which in most families is a specific, known group. Do not try to standardise: sort the guest list by the channel each household actually uses, and accept that you will send some invitations three different ways. That sorting is the whole job, and it takes an hour.

Send from your own number rather than any bulk-messaging service. A wedding invitation arriving from an unknown short code reads as spam, and on some networks it will be filtered before anyone sees it. Wedvite does not send messages for you — you copy the link and send it yourself — which is slower and is also why it lands from a number your guests recognise.

Generate a QR code from the invitation’s address and print it on the card, the order of service, a table card or a welcome sign. It is the bridge between a printed piece and everything the page holds — the map, the schedule, the RSVP — without cramming all of it onto paper. Our free wedding QR code generator makes one from any link.

Always print the web address in full next to the code. A QR code is convenient only for someone who can scan one, and a written address gives everyone else a way in — including a guest whose camera app does not recognise codes and a relative who will ask a grandchild to type it. Test the printed code with two different phones before the print run, not the PDF on screen.

Keep the code big enough and the contrast high: a small code printed in gold on cream is the one that fails at the table. And point it at a link you control and will not change, since a printed code cannot be corrected. Wedding RSVP QR codes covers how a printed code gets a paper guest onto the RSVP page, and how to test the code before the print run.

Through replies, not through the link. This is the honest limit of sending an invitation as a shared link: it carries no delivery receipt and no read confirmation, and it cannot, because the same address can be forwarded, screenshotted or opened twice by one person. Anyone promising you a per-guest open rate from a link you pasted into a chat is describing something else.

So make the reply the signal. Ask one person in each household to confirm they received it, and collect the actual answers on the invitation itself: a Wedvite invitation has a built-in RSVP with a guest-messages dashboard, so replies and notes land in one place as they come in, rather than in six chat threads. Ask the RSVP for the names attending from that household, not just a yes, and you get a headcount you can hand to a caterer. See how an online wedding RSVP page works.

Then keep one authoritative list — a spreadsheet is fine — with a row per household and columns for the channel you sent on, the date you sent, whether they confirmed receipt, and their answer. Phone replies and posted cards go in the same sheet. That sheet, not any dashboard, is the thing you count from on the day the venue asks.

Give the replies room to arrive. Send early enough that a chased household still has a fortnight before the venue wants a number — when to send digital wedding invitations works the dates backwards from your wedding day.