How to Import and Manage a Wedding Guest List
Almost every couple starts with a spreadsheet, and that is the right instinct. What goes wrong is the handover: the list gets retyped into the website, the two versions drift, and nobody is sure which one the caterer should see. This guide covers the columns worth having, how an import actually behaves, and what to do about the guest who forwards their invitation to somebody else.
Build the spreadsheet so it imports cleanly
Most guest-list pain is column pain. Fix it once, in the spreadsheet, before anything is imported.
- One row per person, not per household. Couples and families get one row each, linked later by group.
- First name and last name in separate columns. A single "Name" column has to be split by guesswork.
- An email column, where you have one. Guests without an email can still be invited by a link you send by hand.
- A language column, using the language each guest actually reads.
- Anything else you rely on — plus-one, address, city — in its own column with a plain header.
Keep the messy stuff out of the import: colour coding, comments, merged cells and running totals do not survive a CSV export, and they were never data anyway.
What the import actually does
On LumiWed you upload the CSV and the importer reads the header row. Common spellings are recognised without asking — first_name, firstname, given name, email, language, postcode, zip and their usual variants all land in the right field.
Anything it cannot place with confidence is not guessed. Headers like party, side, group, meal or notes mean different things in different spreadsheets, so the importer asks you to map them rather than writing plausible-looking wrong data. Only first and last name are actually required; everything else is optional, and a thin list you enrich later imports perfectly well.
There is no sync from another platform. LumiWed does not pull guests from The Knot, Zola or Google Contacts — you export a file from wherever the list lives and import that file. It is worth knowing up front, because it also means nothing changes behind your back. (Competitor features verified September 2026 for Zola and August 2026 for The Knot, from their own published pages.)
Give every guest a language
This is the field that pays for itself. The language on a guest's row decides which language their invitation, the wedding site, and the RSVP form open in.
Set it while you import if the column is there, and correct it per guest afterwards for the exceptions — the cousin who prefers English, the partner who reads the other family's language. It is a small edit that removes the most common guest complaint at a multilingual wedding: arriving at a page they cannot read and having to ask a relative what it says.
Personal links, and what to do when one goes astray
Each guest gets their own invitation link. It carries their identity, so their RSVP lands on their row without an account, a password, or an app.
The trade-off is the one that comes with any personal link: whoever holds it can act as that guest. In practice this is fine — it behaves like a paper invitation, and it is why the site is not simply public — but if a link is posted in a family group chat or sent to the wrong person, regenerate that guest's link. The old one stops working and the new one goes only to them.
Let the list be the list
Once the guests are in, stop editing the spreadsheet. Two lists that both look authoritative is the failure this whole process exists to avoid, and the copy on your laptop will always be the one that is three weeks behind.
Keep the guest list where the RSVPs land, add late invitations there, and export when somebody needs a version — the caterer, the venue, the person doing place cards. The export is a snapshot of the truth at that moment, which is exactly what a spreadsheet stops being the day after you send the first invitation.
FAQ
Can I import my wedding guest list from a spreadsheet?
Yes. Export it as a CSV with one row per guest and separate first and last name columns; anything the importer cannot place by its header, you map to the right field before the rows are created.
How do I assign a language to each guest?
Give the spreadsheet a language column, or set it per guest afterwards. That single field is what decides which language the guest's invitation and RSVP open in.
What happens if a guest forwards their invitation link?
Whoever opens it sees that guest's invitation and can answer as them, so treat a link like a personal invitation rather than a public address. If one goes astray, regenerate that guest's link.
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