Type one name, or paste your class list and print every certificate at once. Pick an occasion, draw your signature, give each child their own award. Nothing is uploaded — it all runs in your browser.
Everything runs in your browser; your class list is never uploaded.
Start from an occasion fills in the title, wording, seal and a matching template: star of the week, reading, sports day, leavers and more.
Edit any line, choose from 12 templates and any accent colour, and add your school crest or letterhead.
Type the signers’ names, or Draw signature with a mouse, finger or stylus. You can also upload a scanned one.
Switch to Whole class and paste names from a spreadsheet. Add an Award column and write {award} in the reason.
Print all for the sharpest text, one PDF with a page per child, or a zip with one PNG per name.
{first} and {last} for partsRD-2026-{n}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, and print or download every certificate in one go, in the order you pasted them. Thirty names, one file, one print job. Paste more than one column and it becomes a mail merge: each child can get their own award, reason or date.
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.
{name}, {first}, {last}, {n}, {date} and any column from your list work in every text line, so the reason, the title or the reference number can change per certificate.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. To give everyone their own award, copy two columns with their headers, for example Name and Award, and write {award} where it belongs in the reason. Press longest name under the preview to check the hardest case, and use the arrow keys to step through the rest. Then press Print all, or download the PDF. If your printer has a heavier paper tray, 160–200 gsm makes an enormous difference to how the finished certificate feels.
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 save the sheet as a CSV and press Load .csv. A header row called something like Name, Student or Pupil is recognised, and separate First name and Surname columns are joined.
Yes. Paste or load more than one column with a header row, for example Name and Award. Every column becomes a field you can click to insert, such as {award}, and it works in any line: the title, the reason, the seal text or the reference. Press Try a sample class to see how it works.
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.
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.
All three. Print sends the certificates straight to your printer with crisp, vector text and one page each. PDF holds every certificate as its own page in one file, ready to save or send to a print shop. One PNG per name gives you a zip with an image for every child, named after them, which is the right choice for a newsletter, a website or sending to parents. Choose High quality for larger, sharper images.
Yes. In Whole class mode, One PNG per name downloads a zip with a separate image for every child, each file named after them, so you can attach the right one to each message. For a single child, the PDF or the PNG of the current certificate works too.
Everything happens inside this browser tab — the rendering, the signatures, the PDF and zip assembly, all of it. Your class list is never transmitted, never stored on a server and never seen by anyone else. You can check it by disconnecting from the internet after the page loads: it keeps working. For a UK school this means pupil names never leave your control. The page does use cookie-free, privacy-first visit counting, which records page views but nothing you type.
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, printing and downloading certificates. The zip tool for one PNG per name loads the first time you use it, so press it once while you are still online. This is useful in schools where the wifi is unreliable in certain rooms.
Yes, automatically. The wording, template, colours, logo, signatures and fonts are saved in this browser as you work and come back next time. Your class list is not stored unless you tick Remember this class list on this device, so old pupil names do not linger on a shared computer. To give a colleague the same design, download a design file and let them load it; it never contains names.
Not directly — the PDF contains a rendered image of each page, so the text is not editable in a PDF reader. Come back here, change the wording and download again, which takes seconds; your design is still here because it saves automatically.
That is deliberate. Each name is measured and shrunk until it fits on one line, so a long double-barrelled name never wraps or runs off the page. If the reason is very long, the whole block of text is scaled down a little so it never runs into the signatures, and the preview says text shrunk to fit. Press longest name under the preview to check the hardest case.
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. Put {n} in it, such as CPD-2026-{n}, and every certificate gets its own running number: 001, 002 and so on. Leave it blank and the line disappears. 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 spreadsheet 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 hard to explain to a colleague. Here, pasting your spreadsheet columns into a box gives you the same merge fields 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.
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 downloaded PDF holds a rendered image, so its text is not machine-readable; printing from the page keeps real text. If you need an accessible record of what was awarded, keep the names list alongside the certificates.
The certificate maker is free: no account, no watermark, no export limit and no ads.