An online wedding RSVP works like this: your invitation carries a link or QR code to your wedding website; a guest opens it, finds the RSVP, enters their name, marks each person in their party as coming or not, picks a meal per person if you’re offering choices, and presses send. Their reply lands in a list you can see immediately, alongside everyone else’s, with the meal numbers totted up for the caterer. No app, no account, about a minute of the guest’s time. Here’s the whole flow from both sides, including the parts that need decisions from you.
What the guest sees
From the guest’s side there are four steps. They open your link on their phone, usually from the invitation or the family group chat. They scroll to the RSVP (a good template puts a button for it at the top of the page). They fill in the form: name, who from their household is coming, a meal choice for each person if asked, and sometimes a note to you. They press send and get a confirmation on the page. Guests who can’t or won’t do this (there are always a few) simply tell you the old way, and you record their reply yourself.
What you see
Every reply appears in your dashboard as it arrives: who’s coming, who isn’t, what each person is eating, and any notes. The useful part isn’t any single reply, it’s the running totals: forty-two chicken, eighteen fish, nine vegetarian, and a list of who still hasn’t answered. On Ode’s Plus plan and above that becomes per-course totals and a caterer-ready PDF, which is the document your venue actually asks for in the final weeks.
Open RSVP or guest list?
The one real design decision. An open RSVP lets anyone with the link reply and type their own name: least setup, right for most weddings. A guest-list RSVP means you enter your invited guests first, and each arriving guest finds their household and replies against it: more setup, but it controls plus-ones precisely and, crucially, shows you who hasn’t replied, which is what you’ll care about six weeks out. If chasing replies is your nightmare, the guest list is worth the typing.
Meal choices and dietary needs
You set the courses and options once (starter, main, dessert, with two or three choices each); guests pick per person when they reply. Dietary requirements are better handled as a flag than a free-text medical form: the guest marks that there’s something to discuss and you follow up directly, so sensitive details end up in a conversation with you rather than stored on a wedding website.
Deadlines and chasing
Give guests a deadline four to six weeks before the day, which is when caterers typically want final numbers, and put it on the invitation and the page. Expect a last-minute cluster and a stubborn tail; the fix is a short, cheerful chase message with the link, sent to the not-replied list your dashboard gives you. Our RSVP deadline guide has the timing maths and copy-paste chase messages, and the RSVP wording post has twelve ways to phrase the invitation itself.
The etiquette questions, quickly
- Is an online RSVP rude? No. It’s now the common form for UK weddings, and older guests manage links better than couples fear. Keep a phone number on the invitation for the exceptions.
- Can we still use reply cards? Yes, both at once works: card for the few who’ll want it, link for everyone else, and you record the cards in the same list so the totals stay true.
- What about guests without smartphones? They reply by phone or post and you enter it. Two minutes per guest, a handful of guests.
- Do guests need an account or app? On Ode, never; replies happen on the web page itself. Some platforms pair the RSVP with a guest app, which is a taste question.
Try one before you build one
The quickest way to understand the flow is to click through it as a guest: the example wedding has a live RSVP with meal choices you can fill in without anything being saved. If it looks right, a free website with the same RSVP takes about an hour to put up.