Civil wedding invitations: the guest cap comes first

You call the registry office to confirm the date. They give you a Tuesday at 1pm and one number you weren't expecting: thirty seats in the room. You ask whether that includes the witnesses. It does. Not thirty plus children, not thirty with a few people standing at the back. Thirty. That number shapes the invitation before you have even opened a design.

Which means the first job of a civil wedding invitation is to say who fits. Leave that line out and you will spend the week answering the same question in three different chats, while someone's cousin turns up to find no chair.

Civil wedding invitations: say the guest cap before the menu

Call the town hall or the civil registry and ask how many seats the room holds. If the answer is thirty, the invitation should say it — 'ceremony for 30 guests' or 'seats are limited' — in the first scene, not in a message you send after people have already booked trains.

• Call the town hall or the registry office and ask how many seats the civil room holds. If it is thirty, the invitation reads 'ceremony for 30 guests' so nobody has to text you to check.
• Separate the ceremony from the celebration. Short on seats at the town hall? Mark 'ceremony and drinks' for one group and 'ceremony, dinner and dancing' for the other.
• Put the number next to the date and the time. It is the line guests read first, before the names and before the dress code.
• If the town hall changes the cap, edit that one line. The link stays the same and everyone sees the updated version.

The address is never a detail

Write the exact name of the registry office or town hall, the street and the number. Then add a map link. Civil buildings often share a square or a side street with two other buildings, and a guest with only a name will walk into the wrong one.

Give the ceremony and the drinks or meal separate lines: '1pm ceremony, 2:30pm drinks on the patio'. If there is no parking, name the nearest car park or the closest bus or metro stop, and say which door to use if the building has more than one. In a digital invitation you change any of that without a second round of envelopes.

The photo should not cover the time

Use up to six photos: one cover and five decorative ones. Vertical covers get framed on their own, so pick one that shows the place or a real detail from the day. Keep the text in its own fields — label, names, date, sentence, place — and watch the character counter so nothing ends up cut off on a phone.

If the link carries the cap, the time and the place, you stop being the help desk for your own wedding.

RSVP you never have to chase

Set the questions you actually need — 'Are you coming?', 'Are you bringing someone?', 'Are you staying for dinner?' — and the answers arrive in one ordered list inside the invitation. No group chat, no 'did you see my message?'. Once the date, the cap and the address are settled, the invitation is the easy part: choose a design, try the cover for free, and publish the link when it reads the way you want.