So you’ve decided to DIY your wedding invitations. Whether you’re designing everything from scratch or using one of our invitation templates, there are a few options for printing wedding invitations!
You might consider printing your wedding invitations at home. If you have a small quantity of invitations and a very high quality printer, this might be a good option! Otherwise, we recommend outsourcing wedding invitations to a professional printer – here’s why.
Challenges of Printing Wedding Invitations at Home
At first glance, printing wedding invitations on a home printer might seem like the easiest, cheapest, and quickest way. We urge you to consider a few things before printing your own invites!
- Cost. The actual cost. Consider ink (especially if you’re opting for a colorful design or full flood background), paper (you’ll want to use a nice or thicker cardstock), a paper trimmer (unless you find pre-cut cardstock to the dimensions you need)
- Time. Although printing can be done while you work on other tasks, take into account the time it will take to cut down each piece of paper. Often forgotten is the time to set up for a test print – usually there are a couple runs before you get the formatting perfectly from screen to product, so allow extra time for this part of the process!
- Quality. Unless you own a high quality printer, often the quality of DIY invitations printed at home are a little “meh”. Many home printers don’t handle too thick of paper and colors + overall quality aren’t close to that you can get from using an industrial machine.
When you choose to outsource your printing, you don’t have to worry about ink, paper, cutting, quality — and most importantly, time and stress!
Where to Print Wedding Invitations
Your wedding invitations are the first impression of your big day and set the tone for the entire event. Having quality printing and nice paper really does make a difference. Just because you’re DIYing doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have the best!
When I started the someday paper co template shop after being a boutique invitation designer for over 7 years, I made it a priority to find a printing partner that would give my customers as good a product as my previous clients.
I ordered samples from various companies, researched their timelines, prices, options, and company values – and here’s my favorite places to print!
Prints of Love
Prints of Love is my go to printing partner for my template customers. It’s so incredibly easy to use and their printing is top notch! After you edit your template, download as a PDF, then upload it to Prints of Love. You can choose your quantity, paper type (I love their matte paper for wedding invitations!), and if you want to add free envelopes (yes, please!).
Beyond offering easy ordering and high quality printing, Prints of Love is QUICK! If you need fast wedding invitations, they can handle it. They ship all orders out in 2-3 business days and offer free 2-3 day shipping for US customers! In the wedding world, that’s lightning fast – with no rush fees. *Prints of Love also offers international shipping for a charge.
And if that isn’t enough – they plant a tree in your name when you place an order. Does it get any better than that?
Maybe ‘cause Prints of Love can also print large format signs, programs, menus, place cards – and even envelopes!
Cards and Pockets
If you’re using one of our DIY pocket wedding invitation templates, we recommend Cards and Pockets for printing. The pieces needed to fit in the pocket style invitation are a little different than standard sizes, but Cards and Pockets offers these sizes directly on their website.
For the main invitation, we recommend choosing the 4.5×6.5 so it fits nicely when glued in the pocket folder. The insert cards should all be 3.5 inches wide and if you want to do the stacking effect, we recommend a 3.5×5, 3.5×5.75, and 3.5×6.5. Our pocket templates include all the pieces at this size for multiple insert cards.
Cards and Pocket turnaround can be a little longer than Prints of Love, so definitely order in advance and be patient. If you aren’t worried about time, you can always order sample proofs with them before placing a full order. This is great if you want to see colors in person before committing!
You can also use Cards and Pockets for printing your own envelope liners and belly bands!
Our pocket templates include full, step-by-step directions for ordering everything as shown.
Local Print Shops
Although both of the printing companies we’ve mentioned are small businesses, we are always in favor of supporting local too! If you want to be more involved in the wedding invitation printing process, we recommend finding a local print shop. They’ll often be able to guide you on choosing the perfect paper and can help with file set up too!
A quick online search can lead you to some great finds – just give them a call, ask if they can print wedding invitations, and set up a time to stop by. Make sure they offer a thick cardstock option and see if they’ll allow you to do a printed proof (most will!).
Most local print shops can have your wedding invitations printed within a week!
Office Supply Stores
Although places like FedEx, Staples, and OfficeMax are great for large format signs, they’re not our favorite for printing wedding invitations. Through personal experience, as well as feedback from our customers, the quality isn’t quite up to that of the other options we mentioned. Sometimes it’s a lack of nice paper, issues when cutting, or just faded colors – these are a last resort printing option for us!
Some of the above links are affiliate links meaning we can receive a compensation if you purchase, at no cost to you. We only recommend companies and products we know, trust, and love!
Shopping small and supporting local are always great when it leads to an excellent final product! Our goal is to make the wedding invitation process as easy (and beautiful) as possible for you, so let us know if you have any questions about printing!