Wedding invitations with a gift list: what goes where

Tuesday evening. A friend you invited three weeks ago texts to ask where your wedding gift list is. You send the store link. Ten minutes later your partner sends the same link from a different page, and the friend asks which one is real. That's the mess wedding invitations with a gift list tend to create. Not the gifts. The links.

A gift list and an invitation are two separate decisions, and it helps to make them in that order. Sort out where the gifts go first. Then work out what the invitation itself has to carry, and be honest about what it can't.

Decide the gift list before you pick a design

Four options cover almost every wedding, and each one asks something different of your guests. A store registry runs itself: the shop generates the link and handles the purchase, so your only job is saying where it is and until when. A honeymoon fund lives on a separate platform that shows a progress bar and usually takes a commission. A transfer, or a payment app like Bizum, needs a number plus one sentence explaining what the money is for. That sentence is the hard part.

• Store registry: the shop gives you one link and tracks what's been bought.
• Honeymoon or house fund: a separate platform holds the money, shows progress, and takes a cut.
• Transfer or payment app: quickest to receive, hardest to ask for in writing without sounding like an invoice.
• Envelopes on the table: no link and no explanation, but useless to anyone flying in.

Wedding invitations with a gift list: what goes in, what stays out

A digital invitation is a page, not a PDF or an image. You pick a design, build the scenes in your browser, add up to six of your own photos, choose the music and write the RSVP questions you actually want answered. Date, time, place with its map, dress code. It opens in any browser on a phone, tablet or laptop, and your guests install nothing.

The gift list stays out. That isn't a gap to work around, it's the honest split: the money side belongs with the shop or the platform that handles it. What the invitation does is tell people where to look, either in the text of one scene or in the message you send with the link. Say it once, and say it plainly.

One link that stays current beats three that contradict each other.

Two links and nobody knows which is official

The WhatsApp group ends up with three pinned messages: the map, the time, and the account number. Guests who don't live in the city open four different links and still ask where to park. The problem isn't having two links, it's having none that's clearly the official one. Decide which link gets updated when something changes, and treat every other message as a copy of it.

Four printed copies and one link for everyone

Send the link to everyone. Print four or five copies for the guests who don't use a phone, or who would rather keep something in a drawer. Keep the paper to date, time and place, and skip the QR code if it muddles them more than it helps. Paper never updates; the link always does. You can build the whole thing today for €29.99, one payment, no subscription.