Wedding timelines are the driving force behind a successful wedding day. A well-organized timeline ensures the entirety of the day’s logistics runs smoothly, while protecting the moments and experiences that matter most for you and your partner. While a wedding day timeline is created to help reduce stress for all, there are a few key pieces to protect in your timeline that, if not well planned for, can cause unexpected wedding timeline challenges.
1: PREP TIME NEEDED FOR PHOTO CAPTURES
The first is underestimating how long a photo moment really takes. These moments of the timeline could include details like flat lay styling, a bride getting dressed, doing a bride reveal with her parents, a pajamas photo with all the bridesmaids, or the first look. Leaning on the experience of a photographer and wedding planner is extremely helpful in planning these moments!
For example, getting that cute pj photo with a champagne pop may only take 10 minutes to photograph, but ensuring that hair and makeup is complete for everyone, that all the crew is gathered in their matching pjs, champagne bottle is grabbed, and the room is cleaned will easily take another 20 minutes. Planning each moment appropriately keeps your timeline from getting totally thrown off and protects the space for the moments and emotions you want from your wedding day.
2: NOT ENOUGH TIME FOR HAIR & MAKEUP
Literally every moment in the rest of the timeline hinges on this being done correctly! You can’t capture a pj photo or get the bride dressed for the first look until beauty services have been completed. Work with your beauty stylist and planner to ensure you’re allotting enough time within your timeline. A typical hair or makeup service takes 45 minutes each, which allows for transition time. This being each member of your wedding party getting in the chair, chatting the style, prepping the look, turning over for the next service, etc.
We highly recommend protecting the start time for getting ready to ensure you’re beginning and ending are on time. An 8:00AM beauty start time means that people are IN chairs with artists putting on products by 8:00AM. It doesn’t mean this is when they are waking up and arriving to the hotel suite. That would easily make the schedule 30 minutes behind.
Also ensure that your crew is following the stylist’s provided instructions: arriving with clean and dry hair and a clean face. This will give the beauty artists a strong start in keeping your timeline running smoothly and without delay.
3: TRANSPORTATION DELAYS
Not accounting for travel times, delays, traffic, or coffee stops when planning for transportation times between locations can delay your timeline. This is especially true if everyone is driving themselves instead of taking a provided shuttle. When Google maps says the location is 10 minutes away, you should always add another 15 to 20 minutes for the transition. Getting the wedding party out of the hotel, determining who’s driving, loading up personal items, running back to the room for a forgotten something, driving to the venue, finding parking, locating the missing bridesmaid who drove through for coffee “real quick”… all of these extra minutes add up very quickly and throw your timeline into chaos. Include extra transition time in all of your transportation planning to keep your timeline on track.
4: TIME NEEDED TO BUILD IT UP & BREAK IT DOWN
Another chaos creator for unexpected wedding timeline challenges is underestimating the set up and tear down time it takes to create and disassemble your gorgeous wedding. As you’re creating the timeline, even for a minimalistic styled wedding, we recommend including 3 hours for set-up, achieving to have everything completed 45-60 minutes before the earliest guest arrival. This means if your ceremony is scheduled for 5:00PM, your earliest guest is anticipated to arrive by 4:15-4:30PM, so schedule to have all set-up completed by 3:30PM. This allows time for your photographer and videographer team to capture all the details of the wedding before guests arrive, as well as offering buffer time should set-up be delayed.
For tear down, budget for a minimum of an hour. If your venue requires vendors to be cleaned up and out by midnight, this means your vendor team needs to be breaking down by 11:00PM. So, schedule your last dance and newlywed send-off by 10:45PM to ensure that your vendor team has enough time for clean up without you being charged a late fee by the venue.
5: FAMILY & VIPS ARRIVING LATE TO CRUCIAL MOMENTS
The most consistent, across the board thing that throws off a wedding timeline is family, VIPs, and guests arriving late to the special scheduled moments throughout the wedding day. Every. Single. Time.
Prevent a delayed timeline by buffering in extra minutes for late arrivals to each of your key moments. Schedule the wedding party to arrive 30 minutes before hair and makeup is scheduled to start. Or ask your VIPs and family involved in the ceremony to arrive 45 to 60 mins before the scheduled start time of the ceremony.
Guests will arrive late to the wedding — set your expectation now, this will happen no matter your best preparations — so know in your timeline that even though the ceremony is scheduled to start at 5:00PM, that means the processional may actually begin at 5:10PM. Designate ushers, or someone not involved in the processional, to hold late arriving guests back until after you’ve walked down the aisle, leaving empty spaces in the last few rows on the outside for those guests to quietly slip in once you’ve reached the altar.
6: A BREAK FOR YOURSELF
Another call out we’d like to make is not including any space for emotional moments and time together — just the two of you. Though not necessarily something that will throw your timeline off on the wedding day, it’s a common regret we hear from past couples. Create buffer minutes into your wedding day timeline for unhurried moments with each other. This will give you time to recenter, take a breath, and obsorb the joy and emotions of your wedding day. Add 10 minutes following the first look, following the ceremony, and just before the reception starts as unstructured time to just be with one another.
7: GUEST TRANSITIONS
Don’t forget to plan extra time for guest transitions, like getting mingling guests seated before the ceremony, transitioning guests from cocktail hour to the reception, and moving guests to and from the bar prior to toasts. Adding an extra 10 minutes to allow for these transitions will keep the more key- moments of your wedding day on time!
8: UNORGANIZED FAMILY PHOTOS
The best way to eliminate the anxiety and timeline delays family photos will cause is to be prepared and have a plan. Create a family photo shot list and distribute this to key individuals like your photographer and planner. Also dedicate a point person on each side of your family who has the shot list and knows the faces — it will take much longer for your planner to search for Aunt Susan at the bar than a family member who knows her personally. To keep transitions between photos moving efficiently, have your planner or a dedicated individual ready to call out the photo groups.
Finally, arrange your shot list in order from largest group size to the smallest, dismissing extended family once their group photos are complete. The more family members gathered in the photo area leads to more chatting, which can delay the turnover for each grouping, meaning a great chance of running behind.
9: TOO MANY FORMALITIES
This can be a difficult one to control but don’t plan an excess of formalities, especially when it comes to toasts. Allowing an open mic format for toasts, or allowing for too many toasts, can quickly take your timeline allocation from 20 minutes to two hours. If possible, try to limit it to three or four toasts at most and schedule them following dinner to keep guests from getting too antsy if one of your speakers throws a curveball with a 30 minute toast.
10: MOTHER NATURE HERSELF
Although you can’t always predict how mother nature will behave on your wedding day, it’s important to stay aware of the forecast the week of your wedding. Ice, snow, or heavy rain could cause extended delays in all of the transportation movements or in guest’s arrival to the ceremony. Extreme heat could delay your photo times at outdoor locations due to needing additional hydration and cooling breaks. Keep an eye on the forecast in the 10 days leading to your wedding day and make changes to the timeline beforehand to best avoid unexpected wedding timeline challenges.
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