Editing after you have published

The hall changes on a Tuesday and the invitations went out a fortnight ago. On paper that is a reprint, or an evening of phone calls. Here it is an edit: you change the detail, save, and every link your guests already hold shows the new version. Nothing is resent, because nothing needs to be. What the edit does not do is tell anybody, and that is the part worth getting right.

What changes when you save an edit

Each guest has their own link, and that link points at your invitation rather than at a copy of it. Change the time, and the guest who opens their link tomorrow reads the new time. Change the venue, swap a photograph, correct the spelling of your mother’s name, and the same holds. There is no version two, no second send, no box of paper that is now wrong.

One qualification, plainly and early. If your invitation was built for you by our design team as a custom design, you do not edit it yourself. You send us the change and we make it, which is slower than doing it at your own kitchen table. Everything else here still applies once it is in.

An edit is not a message

This is the part couples get wrong, and it is not a product problem. It is a communication one.

Plan on the assumption that a guest reads your invitation once. They open it the day it arrives, take the date, and may not look at it again until the week of the wedding. Move the ceremony time three weeks later and the invitation is correct from that moment on. Everyone who already read it is still working from four o’clock.

So treat these as two jobs. The edit keeps the invitation true for anyone opening it from now on: the late replies, the forwarded links, the cousin checking the address on the morning. The message is what reaches the people who have already read it.

Telling them works the same way the first send did. From your guest list you go guest by guest, one chat, one tap each. There is no announcement that goes to everybody at once, which sounds like a limitation and mostly is not. A changed time deserves a sentence in your own words rather than a form letter. And for a few names on your list, the uncle who read it the day it arrived and considers the matter settled, it deserves a phone call, as it always did.

The changes that actually happen

Four, in roughly the order they turn up:

• The time moves by an hour. Edit it, then tell everyone. An hour is the size of change a guest assumes they have misremembered, and the size that leaves people in the car park while you are saying your vows.
• The venue changes. Edit the venue and the directions, then tell everyone, twice if it is late. Guests copy addresses into their phones and their own calendars, and neither of those updates when yours does.
• A ceremony is added. The invitation carries it from the moment you save, but nobody who read it last month knows it is there. If some guests are invited to it and some are not, sort out who is on it before you message anyone, so the people you tell are the right people.
• A name is spelled wrong. Fix it on the guest list and the greeting reads correctly the next time they open the invitation, on the same link they were sent. This one needs no announcement. A quiet correction, and an apology if they were the one who mentioned it.

One more thing about the first two. If the date or the time moves materially, treat the replies you already have as provisional. Someone who accepted a Saturday afternoon has not accepted a Saturday evening. Ask again, and the sooner you do it the smaller the correction to the number your caterer wants on a Tuesday. An edit does not touch the replies themselves, so your RSVP list keeps saying what it said before the change.

Why the chat may still show the old venue

There is one place an edit does not reach immediately, and it is the first place couples look. The little panel that appeared under your message when you sent it, picture on top and a line or two of text below, was assembled by the chat app at the moment of sending and then filed away by it. Think of it as a photograph of your invitation taken the day you shared it, not a window onto the invitation itself.

A thread can therefore go on showing the old hall in miniature for days after you corrected it, sometimes until somebody pastes the link into a fresh conversation. Behind the photograph nothing is stale. A guest who taps arrives at today’s version, new hall and new time and all. There is simply no button on your side that makes the picture catch up.

Change the details freely, the address almost never

Editing what the invitation says is safe at any point. Renaming the web address it sits at is not. Treat that address the way you would the number on a gate rather than the furniture indoors: rearrange the rooms as often as you like, but repaint the number and the post stops arriving. Nothing is forwarded on. The moment you rename it, every message already sitting in a guest’s thread opens nothing at all, and a link that has gone dead weeks before a wedding reads to some people as having been uninvited rather than as a tidy-up. Choose the address while you are still building, then leave it be.

When an edit is not the answer

Be honest with yourself about what the invitation is for. It is the record. It is not the news.

If the wedding is postponed, or moved to a different month, a quietly updated page is nowhere near enough. That is a round of phone calls to the people who booked flights, then a message to everyone else, then the edit so the record matches. In that order. The same goes for a cancellation, where the last thing you want is a guest discovering it by opening a link.

Two other cases. If you printed cards as well as sending links, the edit fixes only the digital half, and the paper on somebody’s mantelpiece still says the old hall. And a guest who does not open links at all is untouched by any of this. They were reached by a phone call the first time and they need one now.

Related: What the invitation does