This story was originally published on April 22, 2022, and last updated on November 6, 2023.
A wedding day timeline is the biggest piece of collateral I create for my clients as a professional wedding planner. Simple to make, right?
Yes! Right!
Despite what the Wedding Industrial Complex may try to sell tell you, there’s no trade secret for how to make a wedding day timeline. In fact, I make the timeline template I use for my clients available for free because I feel so strongly that we need to help people feel less overwhelmed and isolated as they plan their weddings.
That said, I have worked more weddings than most people attend in a lifetime so I couldn’t help but pick up a few tricks. Here are the top ways I see clients accidentally screw up their wedding day timelines. I share them so you and your partner can try to avoid these mistakes. I do not share them to make fun of the people who make these mistakes (of course we do! this is not intuitive stuff!).
People underestimate how long it takes to get dressed for a wedding.
It’s easy to assume that getting dressed on your wedding day will be like getting dressed on any normal day. If you don’t have a 30-foot train or aren’t wearing a three-piece suit with all of the trappings, what could possibly take so long?
Honestly, I don’t know but believe me, it just takes longer to get dressed on your wedding day. I’ve seen this play out again and again, most especially among my clients who tell me “we’ll be fast.” They’re the ones who always run an hour behind.
Don’t do this to yourselves. Whenever you’re leaving the place where you’re getting ready to the next place you’re doing a wedding thing (such as photos or the ceremony), have yourself getting dressed no less than 30 minutes before you leave. Ideally, that number is closer to 45 minutes or an hour.
So, if you need to be at Location B by 2 p.m. and it takes 30 minutes to travel to Location B from Location A, you’d leave Location A at 1:30 p.m. This means that you should be putting on your clothes no later than 1 p.m. (and ideally, closer to 12:30 p.m.).
Please note that “putting on your clothes” means that you are 99 percent done with any hair and/or makeup. Some folks like to leave a few final touches for after they’ve got on their wedding attire. That’s fine as long as you tweak the timings accordingly.
People forget that they’ve bought the places and the people for a certain number of hours.
Contracts are a pain in the ass that nobody reads. I get it. Also, if you do only one thing before you sign a contract for your wedding, note how long you are hiring this particular place or person for your wedding day.
These are the numbers a timeline lives and dies by.
They also are the best way to avoid paying out a bunch of extra money in the last few weeks before your wedding. This happens a lot because back when you booked such-and-such vendors, such-and-such number of hours of coverage sounded like plenty. Then you put that against the actual timings of your wedding day and shit! Now you’ve got to buy two more hours of coverage and there goes another $500.
So, note those shifts. It’s OK if it’s a best guesstimate. You’re already going to be leagues ahead of most folks by even knowing how long you’ve hired your vendor team for.
Want a gut check from a professional planner? Here’s what people have to say about renting my Virgo wedding planner brain for an hour.
People don’t know that set-up takes a minimum of two hours and clean-up an hour.
When you’re just beginning to plan your wedding, it’s hard to know how many hours you’re going to need for set-up. For a bare minimum, I recommend no less than two hours (and, honestly, three or four is a lot more comfortable if you can swing it).
That set-up time is before guests arrive, which is usually 15 to 30 minutes before the ceremony (yes, people will arrive early even if they arrive late to everything else in your life. Trust me.)
As for clean-up — or, as your vendors may call it, “teardown” — it’s going to take an hour. It just is. The only exception is if you have some massive floral install or other elaborate set-up that the person doing the set-up tells you is going to take more than an hour to remove.
Set-up and teardown numbers are of note because that time MUST be factored into your overall venue rental, i.e. how many hours you have rented the place(s) where you are hosting your ceremony and reception. Most wedding venue rentals are between six and 12 hours, which sounds like a lot of time until you start subtracting this set-up and clean-up time.
Clients feel this most at the end of the night. They hear the venue say “You need to be out by 11 p.m.” and think “Oh, cool. Yeah 11 p.m. is a great time for the party to end.” Except the party won’t be over at 11 p.m. It’ll be over at 10 p.m. because — say it with me — clean-up takes an hour.
People don’t include sunset.
It took me years of being a wedding planner to appreciate how important sunset is (and yes, my privilege of having regular, consistent access to electricity is completely showing with that confession).
When the sun sets matters because photos need light and the sun is the best (only?) source of natural light that we’ve got. Sunset also influences the Holy Grail of wedding photography: Golden Hour. This is the hour after sunrise or the hour before sunset where the light is, you guessed it, golden.
People love Golden Hour because it makes everyone look damn good. This is why any wedding photographer you might consider hiring stresses Golden Hour photos. They want that good good visual magic.
If this is something you and your partner also want (and it’s OK if you don’t), go Google when the sun sets on your wedding day. Then pencil in Golden Hour photos for between 30 to 60 minutes before that sunset time. Where will you be at in the flow of your wedding day? Is it a time that would work for you and your partner to sneak away from the main party for a photo sess?
People don’t know when they can apply for their legal marriage license.
There’s a lot of irony in wedding planning and the most ironic part is that, nearly always, people forget to get the thing that makes a marriage legal in the eyes of the government, i.e. their marriage license. (Related: They also forget to arrange someone who is legally ordained to marry them, which is such a shame because officiants are the coolest.)
Depending on where you and your partner are getting married, when you can apply for your legal marriage will vary. In the two states where I mainly work, Oregon and Washington State, couples can start this process 60 days out from their wedding. (Oregon folks, learn more about this process here.)
The trick to the whole marriage license bit is to note when you need to get that bad boy back to Uncle Sam after the wedding. In Oregon, it’s five days within the ceremony, which can sometimes catch a client off-guard, particularly if they’re traveling immediately after the wedding. The good news: In Oregon, you can mail the license in vs. dropping it off in person. I nearly always do this for my clients.
People don’t leave space for “emotional buffer.”
People discount the emotional tenor of a wedding day. Sure, sure, we expect to feel something out of the norm but you 100 percent cannot predict this part because this particular day in this particular way has never happened before and will never happen again. That’s what makes weddings magical!
Alas, because we’ve never lived this particular day before, we often fail to build in what I call “emotional buffer.” We cram our wedding day timeline so full of Shit To Do that we don’t afford ourselves the luxury of feeling the feels.
The best tip I have is to have any pre-ceremony activities end 30 minutes before the ceremony begins. That 30 minutes has saved my planner butt more than once and, more importantly, it’s gives the client breathing room earlier in the day to sit in that joyful place called “I’m getting married today.”
A VIP who unexpectedly starts crying while you hold hands and reminisce? A quick 10 minutes to sneak out and make out with your soon-to-be wedded partner? Thirty seconds alone to yourself in the bathroom to process what you’re just about to do?
This is where the magic happens but it’ll only thrive if we give it room.