Type one name, or paste your entire class list and get every certificate in a single printable PDF. Star awards, reading challenges, sports day, end of year. Nothing is uploaded — it all runs in your browser.
Most free certificate tools are designed around making a single beautiful award. That is not the job most teachers actually have. The job is thirty certificates on the last Friday of term, all identical except the name, all needing to come out of one printer without thirty rounds of copy, paste, download.
So this one is built the other way round. Type a name for a one-off, or switch to Whole class, paste your register straight from a spreadsheet column, and download a single PDF with one certificate per page in the order you pasted them. Thirty names, one file, one print job.
Everything runs inside your browser. Your class list never reaches a server, which matters more than it sounds: a list of children's full names attached to a school is exactly the sort of thing you should not be uploading to a free website with an unclear privacy policy. There is no account, no watermark, no export limit, and it keeps working if the school wifi drops out mid-lesson.
Set the design and wording once using any name as your test. Switch to Whole class. Copy the name column out of your register spreadsheet and paste it into the box — one name per line, blank lines ignored. Use the arrows under the preview to spot-check a few, especially the longest name, since long names shrink automatically to stay on one line. Then download the PDF and print it. If your printer has a heavier paper tray, 160–200 gsm makes an enormous difference to how the finished certificate feels.
Free, with no catch and no account. There is no trial, no export limit, no watermark on the output and no upsell at the download step. It is one of a set of free browser tools on this site, paid for by nothing at all — there are no ads and no tracking of what you make.
There is no hard limit. A typical class of 25–35 builds in a few seconds. A whole year group of 200 works but takes a minute or two, because each page is rendered individually at print resolution inside your browser. If you are doing several hundred, split it into year groups — you will get the pages faster and a more manageable file to print.
Two ways. Either select the name column in your register spreadsheet, copy, and paste straight into the names box — spreadsheet columns paste as one name per line automatically. Or export that column as a CSV and use the file picker, which reads the first column and skips a header row if it is called something like Name or Student.
Yes. Upload a PNG, JPG or SVG under Logo & background and it sits above the title. A square or landscape image works best; anything very tall gets scaled down to fit the header space. SVG stays perfectly sharp at any print size, so use it if your school has one.
Yes — upload it as the background rather than the logo, and it fills the whole page behind the text. Use the fade slider to knock it back so the wording stays legible; somewhere around 20–40% usually looks right for a busy design. For a landscape A4 certificate an image of roughly 1123×794 pixels or larger will print without softness.
A4 landscape for the UK, Ireland, Europe, Australia and most of the world. US Letter for the United States and Canada. Getting this wrong is the single most common cause of a certificate printing with unexpected white margins or slightly cropped edges, so set it before you print rather than after.
That is your printer, not the certificate. Almost all home and office printers cannot print right to the edge of the sheet and reserve a few millimetres. In your print dialog look for Scale to fit, Fit to printable area or Borderless. The designs here keep their border well inside the page precisely so this margin does not clip anything important.
Screens emit light and mix colour additively; printers lay down ink and mix it subtractively, so bright screen colours — especially vivid greens, oranges and purples — always come out more muted. Nothing is wrong. If a colour matters, print one test copy before committing to thirty, and pick a slightly deeper shade than looks right on screen.
Standard 80 gsm copier paper works but feels flimsy in a child's hand. 160–200 gsm card is the sweet spot: it feels substantial, survives a school bag, and still feeds through a normal printer. Anything heavier than about 250 gsm risks jamming unless your printer has a dedicated card tray or a rear straight-through path.
Both are available. PDF is what you want for printing — it holds every certificate as its own page in one file and prints at full resolution. PNG gives you a single high-resolution image of the certificate currently in the preview, which is the right choice for a class newsletter, a website, or sending to a parent by message.
Yes. Download the PDF and attach it, or use PNG if you want it to display inline in the message body rather than as an attachment. For a whole class you will get one PDF containing everyone, so if you are emailing individually it is easier to switch to single mode and export each child separately, or split the PDF afterwards.
No. Everything happens inside this browser tab — the rendering, the PDF assembly, all of it. Your class list is never transmitted, never stored on a server and never seen by anyone else. You can verify it by disconnecting from the internet after the page loads: it carries on working perfectly. For a UK school this means no data leaves your control and there is no third-party processor to account for.
Once the page has loaded, yes. The fonts and the PDF library are fetched on first load and cached by your browser, after which you can lose connection and keep making and downloading certificates. This is genuinely useful in schools where the wifi is unreliable in certain rooms.
If you press Remember these settings, yes — the wording, template, colours, signatures and fonts are stored in this browser and reload automatically next time. Your class list is deliberately not stored, so old pupil names do not linger. Settings live in this browser on this device only; clearing your browsing data removes them.
Not directly — the PDF contains a rendered image of each page, so the text is not editable in a PDF reader. The intended workflow is to come back here, change the wording and download again, which takes seconds. If you saved your settings, everything is exactly as you left it.
That is deliberate. Names longer than about eighteen characters are scaled down automatically so they stay on one line rather than wrapping awkwardly or running off the page. When you are printing a class set it is worth clicking through to your longest name to check it still looks right — that is what the preview arrows are for.
Accented Latin names — Zoë, Siân, Björn, Łukasz, Nguyễn — render correctly in every template. Non-Latin scripts such as Arabic, Greek, Chinese or Cyrillic will display, but the decorative heading fonts do not include those characters so the browser substitutes a fallback face, which looks noticeably plainer. If you have such names in the class, the Georgia or Montserrat heading options handle them more gracefully.
It is an optional field for anyone who needs to log what was issued — a training provider recording CPD hours, a club tracking awards, or a school keeping a record of who received what. Leave it blank and the line disappears entirely. It is not verified by anything; it is simply printed on the certificate for your own records.
No, and no free tool can make them so. A certificate carries whatever authority the issuing organisation has — your school, club or training body. These are attractive, professional-looking documents you issue in your own name. They are not, and cannot be, an accredited qualification, and they should not be presented as one.
Canva is a far more powerful design tool with thousands of templates, and if you want complete creative freedom over a single certificate it is the better choice. This is narrower on purpose: it does class sets from a name list in one file, it needs no account, it adds no watermark, it does not upload your pupils' names, and it opens instantly. Use Canva to design something special; use this when you need thirty of them before Friday.
Word can do this through mail merge, and if you already have that set up it works well. But mail merge is fiddly to configure, breaks when the data source moves, and is genuinely hard to explain to a colleague. Pasting a column of names into a box and pressing download achieves the same result without any of that setup — and unlike a Word template, the layout cannot drift when someone opens it in a different version.
Almost always a font that had not finished loading when the page was captured. Wait a couple of seconds after the page opens and try again. If a background image is involved, make sure it finished uploading — very large images take a moment to decode. Failing that, reload the page; your saved settings will come back and the render starts clean.
Yes. There is no licence restriction on what you produce here, and nothing is watermarked. Tutors, clubs, training providers and businesses are all welcome to issue certificates made with this tool, including as part of a paid course. The tool itself remains free.
Yes, though a tablet or laptop is much more comfortable — a certificate is a wide document and the controls have a lot in them. On an iPad it works well in landscape. On a phone the preview is small and building a large class set may be slow, since every page is rendered by the device itself. For a full class, use a computer.
The editor uses standard form controls, real labels and native buttons, so it is navigable by keyboard and readable by a screen reader. The certificate output is, by its nature, a visual document — the exported PDF holds a rendered image, so the text within it is not machine-readable. If you need an accessible record of what was awarded, keep the names list alongside the PDF.