Your guests should not have to read a board to find out where they are sitting. Build the seating plan in your dashboard and publish it, and a seated guest opening their own personal link finds their table on the invitation, under their name. Nothing shows before you publish, and nothing shows for a guest who has no seat yet or who is holding the shared link rather than their own. Here is what they see, when to publish, and what to do when someone moves an hour before dinner.
Why the board becomes a bottleneck
Picture the twenty minutes between the ceremony ending and dinner starting. Everyone arrives at one entrance, and one printed board stands beside it. The queue moves at the speed of the slowest reader, and that is usually an aunt looking up her own name, then her sister, then her sister’s husband, then two cousins, all from the front of the board. Everyone behind her waits.
A second board splits the queue rather than removing it, and doubles the chance one of the two is out of date. More than one ceremony makes it worse: with a homecoming as well as a reception, the same guest sits somewhere different on each day, and each day opens with its own queue at its own board.
What a guest sees on their own link
Each guest gets their own link, usually sent on WhatsApp, and that link knows who they are. Once you publish the plan, their table appears on the invitation in place of the RSVP section.
- A seated guest on their own link sees their name, the words “Your table”, and the table itself. Underneath it there is a search box for looking somebody else up.
- When a ceremony has its own floor plan, the label names the ceremony, so a guest at a two-day wedding reads something like Reception: Table 5 & Homecoming: Table 2 rather than two bare numbers.
- A party split across two tables sees both, joined into one line, so a family reading Table 3 & Table 4 learns it from the invitation rather than from the seating steward.
- Someone on the general invitation link gets the search on its own, because a shared link cannot know who is holding it. Three letters of a name brings up matches, and tapping one shows the table.
- A guest who has not been seated yet sees no table line. They get the search, and nothing that looks broken.
Nothing shows until you publish it
Seating is the part of planning that stays unfinished the longest. You move a family off Table 4 so the grandmother is nearer the door, then move them back when the venue says Table 4 is furthest from the kitchen. If guests could watch that happen, some would memorise an arrangement you had already changed and a few would ring you about it.
So the plan stays hidden behind one button. Until you press it, a guest opening their link sees the ordinary invitation and no mention of tables. Press it and every seated guest sees their table the next time they open theirs; press it again and everything goes back to hidden.
When to publish
Publish when you have stopped moving people, and not before. In practice that is once the caterer has final numbers, because the conversation that fixes the count usually fixes the tables too. Two or three days out is a comfortable window, and that figure is our suggestion rather than anything we have measured: late enough that the arrangement is real, early enough that a guest who reads it can ask you quietly instead of at the door.
Two things push against publishing early. A visible plan invites negotiation, and every day it is up is another day somebody can ask to be moved. It also closes the RSVP section, so you lose replies you have not collected yet. If your invitation is live and paid for and the plan is still unpublished five days before the wedding, we send one reminder email. Treat it as a prompt to finish the plan, not to publish that afternoon; replies keep landing on your RSVP dashboard until you do.
If you are not assigning seats at all, say so rather than leaving the promise standing. The RSVP section normally tells guests their table will appear there later, and there is a switch that swaps that line for an ordinary closing message. Flip it before anyone starts waiting for a table that is never coming.
Moving someone after you have published
The table is worked out fresh every time a guest opens their link, so a change reaches them without a resend. Move a guest in the seating designer and their next open shows the new table, on the same link they have always had. No correcting message goes out behind the first one.
Two exceptions are worth planning around. A guest who screenshotted their table in the car is carrying an answer that will not refresh, so if you move somebody in the last hour, tell them directly. And the invitation is a web page: a banquet hall in a basement is a room where nobody can look anything up. That is the argument for printing something regardless, and the same plan prints as a seating chart, a guest list or name tags for the tables themselves.
When a board is still the right answer
If a real part of your list will not be holding a phone at the door, keep the board. That means elderly relatives at a large family wedding, guests who were invited in person and never received a link, and the plus-ones who arrive attached to somebody else and have no invitation of their own. A link cannot help a person who is not carrying one, and borrowing a phone at the door is a worse arrival than the queue would have been.
For most weddings the honest arrangement is both: one board at the entrance for the people who need it, the published plan for everyone else, and someone standing near the board who knows the room. The printed chart keeps every table where you placed it in the designer, so it works as a map of the hall for a guest who has their table number and still cannot see where that table is. What the link removes is not the board. It is the queue.
Frequently asked questions
Can a guest look up somebody else's table?
Yes. Under their own table there is a search box: three letters of a name brings up matches, and tapping one shows that guest’s table. One person can find the rest of the family that way instead of four of them queueing separately.
What happens if I move someone after publishing?
Their link shows the new table the next time they open it, and nothing is resent. The case to watch is a guest who screenshotted the old one, so if the change is late, tell them yourself.
Can I publish one ceremony and keep the other hidden?
No. Publishing covers every ceremony’s plan on that invitation at once. If the homecoming seating is not settled, either finish it or hold the publish until it is.
Related: Wedding seating chart maker