Wedding Invitations & Save the Dates

Save the dates for day guests only would send them now. You can get good ones on Etsy for a £1 each. We got ours from BeeCreativeOnline, they are on Etsy and have loads of designs


For invites, we are doing it through email, directing to our website on here as saves money and also more sustainable and easier for people to RSVP in this digital age. Send then about 4 months before and give 4 weeks to reply so you have time to chase non responses and move people up to day guests if you have declines and ensure you have your numbers for catered as they will have a deadline.
Regards meal, depends on your venue as most just have one meat option and a veggie one so you just need to get people to tell you dietary needs when accepting and you can use the tools on here to manage.
For eve guests invite 3 months before but can let then know now so they know to save the date.
Hope that helps a bit, good luck!

Firstly congrats on your engagement and hope you're feeling excited about your big day.

We're quite untraditional in general but didn't feel it was a big deal at all to just send our save the dates via a message or email. We're having 40 of our closest friends and family who we speak to all the time, so it felt right to drop a message and save some pennies. We both work in marketing luckily so feel confident designing our own invites on Canva (I would really recommend), and then you can print them through the site too on quality paper or card - this is SO much cheaper than some of the quotes I've received from people. My friend is making hers by hand using craft bits and bobs to save some money too which I think is such a lovely idea. We'll be sending them out next year once we've confirmed the menu etc (for our August 2022 wedding). The main thing as soon as we put our deposit down was to let everyone know so they can book it off work.

Everyone's different, and my friends have sent out beautiful save the dates, as it felt right for them to do that - there's no one size fits all, I hope that my response may help to take any pressure off if the cost of save the dates does feel overwhelming. More money for the honeymoon/bubbly in my opinion!

Wishing you loads of luck with planning and your wedding day x

Have you looked on Etsy at printable/downloadable invites and Save the Dates? I paid about £5 for our Save the Date template and bought some linen card from hobby craft. They looked fab (if I do say so myself 😂) everyone thought I had ordered them professionally x

If you are worried about people planning ahead then I think you can do a nice digital Save The Date, could do something easily in Canva as others have suggested or use something like Paperless Post which has cheap options. Either email or text people to let them know. I have a lot of family coming from the US so we went traditional with paper ones but I designed everything myself and only had to pay for the printing/stamps. Will do the same again for invites and any other paper stationery needed early next year for our May wedding. Doesn’t have to cost the earth and it’s easy to make stuff personal to you if you’re content with doing it digitally.

Not sure if it's helpful, but I made my save the dates on Canva, saved it as a jpg. Then we whatsapped everyone with it. It was useful doing that so everyone could keep the date free, especially given with Covid, weddings were moving into 2021 so it prevented people double booking. We have a wedding website which we used to upload all the details when ready to, so there was somewhere for people to go and check. Invites only went out recently as Covid delayed our plans, but we text everyone after mid-July to check if they were still planning to come and if so, give them the basic details like hotels and timings. I made the invites by hand, you can get these done though by Etsy or print companies. Invites cost no matter how you do it, weddings only ever reduce in costs if you reduce number of guests tbh!!


Covid really messed up the usual wedding planning process for us even though we didnt have to rebook the wedding, just had no idea how to plan things with changing restrictions. If yours is going to be like 2+yrs away then it'll likely be fine by then. But always good to keep guests updated.

View quoted message Thanks everyone, some fab ideas here so will definitely get exploring online!!! Wishing you all the best with your wedding planning too 👰🏼‍♀️❤️