Christening Invitation Mistakes to Avoid Before You Send

Saturday, 9:40 in the morning. You paste the invitation into the family group — 38 people — and put the phone down. By lunchtime the questions start. "It won't open for me." "What time is the meal?" "I already said yes, didn't I?" Nobody is being difficult. These are the ordinary christening invitation mistakes, and almost all of them are in the format, not the wording.

A christening — or a baptism, if that's what you call it — doesn't need a fancy invitation. It needs the child's name, two times, one address and a reply-by date. Everything below is what usually gets in the way of that.

Christening invitation mistakes you can catch in two minutes

Three failures show up again and again. A 12 MB PDF that sits on "downloading" while your grandmother waits. Artwork where the date in the bottom corner disappears the moment the phone shrinks the preview. Links or folders that expire, so whoever opens the message on Wednesday finds a blank page. None of it is your guests' fault, and none of it takes long to fix.

• Child's full name, date, ceremony time and meal time — read them twice before you hit send.
• The complete address for the church and the restaurant, with a map link that's already tappable.
• A reply-by date written inside the invitation itself, not agreed by voice.
• One place for RSVPs. Not three chats and a phone call.

A date with no time is half an invitation

Write "lunch to follow" on a printed card and it sounds relaxed. Write it in a WhatsApp group and you'll get eleven separate messages asking when you actually sit down. Naming the restaurant without the town or a map link does the same thing: anyone who isn't local ends up searching for it themselves. And if your guests are getting three invitations this month, "our little one" isn't enough — put the baby's name on it.

The other problem is the invitation that ages in a week. The ceremony moves to four, or the restaurant changes, and everyone who saved a screenshot keeps reading the old version. On a page you can edit, the link stays the same and your guests see the current version when they open it again.

An invitation isn't finished when you send it. It's finished when every guest can find the date, the time and the door.

One link, and a few printed copies for the keepsake box

If a grandparent or a godparent wants something for a drawer, digital alone won't cover it: the sensible combination is one link for everyone and a handful of copies printed at home for the people who'll keep them. For anyone who isn't comfortable with phones, a link that opens in the browser is the shortest route — nothing to install, nothing to register. So before you send, read your invitation the way a guest will: on a phone, in a hurry, between a hundred other messages. Fix the two times, add the map link, put one reply-by date on it, then send it once and stop chasing.