Stop refreshing and let the replies find you. RSVP alerts are on by default, and every reply reaches you one way or the other: a push notification if you have push switched on for any device, an email if you have not. Never both for the same reply, and never neither. Push is enabled separately on each device you want notified, so if you have never turned it on anywhere, the alerts simply arrive as email instead. What follows is which channel suits you, and when to turn the lot off.
Why you keep opening the dashboard
Replies do not arrive evenly. You send the links on a Sunday evening, thirty people answer within the hour, then nothing for three days, then eleven the morning after your mother rings her sisters. There is no rhythm to learn and nothing to plan around, so you check. Then you check again while the kettle boils.
The refreshing is not really about the count. It is about not knowing whether anything has happened since the last time you looked, and that is a question a notification answers once and properly.
Push or email, and which one suits you
Push is the phone notification. It arrives on the lock screen while the app is closed, it names the guest, and tapping it opens your guest links page. It suits you if you want to know within the minute, and if a phone that lights up during dinner does not bother you.
Email is what you get when push has nowhere to go: same names, same numbers, waiting until you are ready for it, and searchable six weeks later when you cannot remember whether your uncle ever answered. It also catches the case where push was tried on every device you have and every one of them failed, so a dead subscription does not swallow an alert.
Two things to hold on to. You never get both channels for one reply, so turning push off does not double anything up, it moves it. And the email deliberately fires less often than the push does, which is the next section.
On a wedding where each ceremony is answered separately, a guest works through the poruwa, the homecoming and the reception one at a time. Every one of those is a push, because pushes stack under a single heading on your phone and you can glance past them. Emails do not, so the email waits for the summary line on your guest list to actually change. Somebody accepting a second ceremony for the same number of people has not changed that line, and you will not get a second message about it. Replies through the public link are quieter still: the email goes on a first submission and not on an edit, so a stranger amending an answer already sitting in your approval queue sets nothing off.
What the notification actually says
Enough to act on, and not much more than that.
- Which invitation it belongs to, in the heading
- Who replied, by name
- Whether they accepted and for how many people, though a decline through the public link says only that they responded
- For a public-link reply on a wedding with several ceremonies, how many of them that guest accepted
That last line only appears on the public path. A personal-link reply to a multi-ceremony wedding tells you the guest is coming and for how many, but not which ceremony they answered - so an aunt who accepts the poruwa and skips the homecoming looks, on your lock screen, exactly like one coming to both. Two different numbers for two different caterers. Tapping the notification opens your guest links page with the reply attached to that guest, which is where the ceremony-by-ceremony picture lives.
What it will never do is tell you a reply has not arrived. Nothing buzzes when your cousin ignores you for three weeks. Chasing stays a decision you have to make, and the dashboard is where you find out who to chase.
When the alerts turn into noise
They will, and the point at which they do is fairly predictable. Take this as planning lore and not as anything we have measured: replies tend to arrive in two clusters, a small one in the days after you send the links and a much bigger one in the last week before your deadline. During the second cluster, a phone that buzzes on every reply has stopped being information and started being weather.
That is the moment to change how you do this, and there is nothing wrong with changing it.
- Turn RSVP alerts off in your notification settings and open the dashboard once a day at a fixed time, so it becomes a habit rather than a compulsion.
- Or turn push off on the phone in your pocket and leave it on the laptop you only open in the evening, since the switch is per device and the two do not have to agree.
Turning push off everywhere does hand the job to email, and during the last-week rush that is usually a trade rather than a fix: the phone stops buzzing and the inbox fills up instead. If the volume is the problem rather than the interruption, turn the alerts off altogether and rely on the daily check.
Use your phone’s own focus settings alongside either one. Guests reply at odd hours, someone abroad will answer at three in the morning your time, and there is nothing on our side that holds a notification back until a more civilised one.
When a notification is not what you need
If your list is thirty people and most of them will tell you in person long before they open the link, this solves a problem you do not have. Leave the alerts off and look when you think of it. The same goes if your reply deadline is months away: being told instantly about something you will not act on for eleven weeks is just a smaller version of refreshing the page.
Worth knowing as well: the alert goes to the account the invitation belongs to. If your mother or a coordinator is the one actually chasing replies, they will not be told, you will, and you will have to pass it on. If that is your arrangement, agree a daily check with them instead of assuming the phone covers it.
And a notification is not a head count. It is one guest at one moment, before anyone has looked at whether a party of four is really a party of six, or whether two people have replied for the same household - and a public-link reply is not even in your totals yet, because it waits for you to approve it before it counts anywhere. The number your caterer wants by Tuesday comes from the RSVP dashboard, not from adding up your lock screen.
Frequently asked questions
Will I get a notification for every single reply?
One per reply as it arrives, rather than a daily summary. A guest with a personal link who goes back and changes a settled answer sets off another; a public-link submitter editing an answer that is still waiting for your approval does not. If it is all too much in the final fortnight, turn the alerts off and check the dashboard once a day instead.
Do these work on an iPhone?
Yes, with one step first. Open the dashboard in Safari, use Share then Add to Home Screen, and open it again from the home screen icon. Apple only delivers this kind of notification to an app installed that way, so the option to enable it appears after you have done that, not before.
If I turn notifications off, do I miss replies?
No. Every reply is recorded whether or not anything told you about it at the time. The notification sits on top of the record as a convenience; it is never the record itself. Turning it off changes what your phone does and nothing else.
Related: How RSVPs work