How to let wedding guests find their table online, without publishing your guest list
Put a search box on your wedding website’s day-of page. A guest types their name and sees their table, and nothing else. Print a QR code to the site on the welcome sign, keep a paper chart by the door for anyone without a phone, and if your guest list is sensitive, put a password on the site for the day.
That last step is the one most guides skip, and it is the reason this one exists. A name search keeps the guest list off the screen. It does not always keep it off the page.
Three ways to show a seating chart
| Printed board | Full list on your website | Name search on your website | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Who can read every name | Everyone in the room | Anyone with the link | Nobody on screen (see below) |
| Works without a phone | Yes | No | No |
| A change on the morning | Reprint it | Edit and it shows | Edit and it shows |
| A queue at the door | Likely, with a large guest list | No | No |
A printed board is still worth having, even next to a website. If you print one, the usual advice holds: alphabetical by surname for larger weddings, by table for smaller ones, where guests tend to arrive in groups.
A full list on the website is the easiest thing to make and the one to avoid. It publishes every guest’s name, with who they are sitting with, to anyone the link reaches, and links travel.
A name search shows one guest one row. It is the best of the three for the evening itself, as long as you know what it does and does not hide.
What a name search should show
Name and table. A seat number if you have assigned seats, and the table’s name if your tables have names. That is all.
Leave out meal choices, dietary needs, notes about plus-ones and email addresses. If your seating spreadsheet started life as an RSVP export, it probably holds all of those, so choose the columns the page shows rather than showing the sheet. On Pragte, only the columns your design uses reach the published site. The rest of the sheet stays in your account.
Hidden is not private
Most name searches, Pragte’s included, run in the guest’s browser. The page arrives with every row in it, and the search box decides which one to show as the guest types. That is why it answers instantly, and why it keeps working on a weak venue connection once the page has opened.
It also means anyone who opens the page’s source can read every name and table in it.
For most weddings that is fine. A seating plan is on a board in the room anyway, and a name next to a table number reveals very little. But if it is not fine for yours, because a guest is well known, because of a family situation, or because the list includes children’s names, then put a password on the site for the day and share it at the venue. A password keeps the whole page, list included, away from anyone who does not have it.
On Pragte any published site can have a password, on any plan, from Settings, Who can see it. Guests enter it once on each device.
How to set one up
Here is the whole process, from spreadsheet to welcome sign. The Pragte steps are named where they differ from any other tool.
- Make a sheet with one row per guest. Two columns are enough: Name and Table. Add plus-ones by name if you know them. If you don’t, write “Guest of Sam Lee”, so that searching for Sam finds both.
- Write names the way guests will type them. The search matches any part of what a row shows and ignores capitals, so “ann” finds Anna, Joanna and Hannah. It does not ignore accents: someone typing “jose” will not find “José”. Put the other spelling or the nickname in the name itself, as “José (Jose) Ruiz” or “Robert (Bob) Hale”. A surname finds the whole family at once.
- Bring the sheet in. On Pragte, sheets live in Sheets on your dashboard and in the editor’s Data panel. Paste the cells from your spreadsheet or import a CSV.
- Place it as a finder. Drag the sheet from Data onto the page and choose Finder. Nothing shows until someone types, then their matches appear, five at most, with a note to type more if there are others. Design the one row it shows, and it repeats for every guest.
- Check that the finder holds everyone. In the finder’s settings, Show at most sets how many rows of the sheet it searches, up to 200. Set it to your number of guests. For a wedding of more than 200, use two finders, split by surname.
- Put it on the pages for the day. A Pragte site has phases, versions of the site that switch on the dates you set. Place the finder in the wedding day’s phase, and it appears that morning without you doing anything. How phases work.
- Print the QR code. On Pragte it is in Settings, Share your site, as a PNG or an SVG. Put it on the welcome sign and at the bar. It opens your site as it is on the day, so it can be printed months ahead.
- Test it on a phone, on mobile data. Try a hyphenated name, an accented one, two guests who share a surname, and a name that is not on the list. Each should give the answer a guest would expect.
On the day
Keep the paper chart. A single printed list by the entrance covers every guest whose phone is flat, who does not scan codes, or who reaches the door just as the signal drops.
If someone moves table that morning, change their row in the sheet. On Pragte the site picks up the changed sheet the next time a guest opens the page, without publishing again.
The day after
Take it down. The seating plan has done its job, and there is no reason to leave a page of names and tables online for the years the rest of your site may stay up. On Pragte, the After phase replaces the day’s pages on the date you set, so the finder goes when the thank-you arrives. There is more on that in what to do with your wedding website after the wedding.
Where it falls short
- It needs the page to load once. At a venue with no signal at all, it helps only the guests who opened it before they arrived. Send the link the day before.
- It helps guests who know to look. The QR code and a line on the welcome sign (“Find your table: scan here”) do more than the feature itself.
- It is not a floor plan. It tells a guest where they sit, not where that table is in the room. If the room is large, number the tables so they can be seen from the door, or add a small plan to the page.
Pragte’s finder is part of every plan, including the free one. If you are planning a wedding or an event and want to try it, try the early access at pragte.app.