Questions To Consider Before Creating Your Wedding Timeline:
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What Is The Most Common Wedding Ceremony Time In The Uk
Most ceremonies in the UK start between 11am and 3pm depending on the type of service. Church ceremonies are equally likely to take place in the morning as afternoon, while most registry office and civil ceremonies will only take place in the afternoon. However, the most common start time for a wedding ceremony is between 1pm and 3pm.
Best Apps And Websites For Planning Your Wedding Day
Planning your wedding can be a daunting task. With the help of the best apps and websites, you can manage your wedding planning process with ease.
The best websites for planning your wedding include Wedding Wire, The Knot, and Wedding Bee. These websites have comprehensive lists of vendors and services that you might need for your big day. Additionally, these websites provide a list of recommended vendors to look for based on the particular service.
The best apps for planning your wedding include The Knots app, Wedding Happy, Wedding Day Planner by WeddingWire. These apps allow you to create a detailed timeline of events and share it with family members or other people involved in the process. Using these helpful tools, you can also keep your wedding planning and wedding day organized.
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Pm On The Wedding Day Timeline
After the prelude music plays and guests take their seats, the groom takes his place at the wedding arch and the procession begins. The ceremony usually lasts about 30 minutes. Some couples have special readings and prayers. Some add a handfasting ceremony, a sand ceremony or a unity candle ceremony. You could choose to add other important events that would increase the duration of your ceremony.
Distribute Your Timeline Appropriately

Make sure that everyone intimately involved in your wedding has a copy of your timelinehard copy and electronically, if possiblein order to stay in the loop and to stay on schedule. This applies not only to the wedding party and immediate family, but also to people at your venue and any other key vendors, like your photographer.
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How Long It Takes To Travel To The Church
Is there a soul on this planet who hasnt turned to s or an AA route planner to work out travel times? If youre unfamiliar with Irish roads, expect teeny roads with high-hedges and slow-moving tractors in rural parts.
I suggest that rather than trust the route planning Apps entirely, its better to err to the side of caution. As much as a lifesaver Google Maps is, it cant guess how many tractors therell be en route, so remember to cushion a few extra minutes of travel time. Also, where possible, keep travel distances to a minimum.
Start With Your Ceremony
Youre probably thinking you should start at the beginning of your day to plan out your timeline, but this will actually confuse you more than help you! By starting at your ceremony and working outward, you start with the most important part of the day. First, ask yourselves if youre having a religious or civil ceremony. Most religious ceremonies are about an hour, while most civil ceremonies are closer to 30 minutes. Once you solidify how much time your ceremony will take, work from there. You should aim to have your ceremony about two hours before sunset.
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Expert Tips For Creating The Perfect Wedding
There’s a lot of effort that goes into planning the perfect wedding. From making the guest list and choosing all of the gorgeous decorations to booking the right vendors and coming up with a seating chart that will make every guest happy, pulling off the best party of your life isn’t so easy. While the details do matter, one of the most important wedding planning tasks you’ll need to handle is coming up with your day-of timeline. It may not be as fun as picking out the flowers or your dinner menu, but it’s even more important in ensuring your day goes smoothly.
It may not be glamorous, but you and your husband-to-be should spend time mapping out the entire wedding dayfrom the moment you both wake up to your final reception exit as husband and wife. Map out time for hair and makeup, first-look photos, cocktail hour, toasts, and everything in between. After all, you don’t deserve to feel stressed on the day you say “I do,” but without a carefully considered timeline, you’re opening yourselves up to lots of big-day surprises.
Want to make sure everything goes smoothly? Here, a few experts share their tips on what not to forget when creating your wedding day timeline.
Build Your Wedding Timeline Around The Ceremony
The wedding ceremony is officially the most important part of your day, so we have to get you there right. on. time. The time of your wedding ceremony sets when everything else must happen.
In the next section, Ill show you how to get yourselves to the church with time to spare for must-have family and friends wedding shots.
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Before You Schedule Your Wedding Day Talk To Your Photographer
This is one of the biggest mistakes that brides dont often think about. To help yourself feel less stressed and to make your day run as smoothly as possible, talk to your photographer and other wedding experts before you schedule your wedding day timeline. The people you hire to support you on your big day have been to multiple weddings and know what works the best. By talking with your photographer before you schedule your events, you can make sure that you get your pictures taken at the best times of day possible, that you have enough time to get your pictures done, and that all of the details that you care about have time to be photographed. We have example timelines that we like to send to our couples when they choose us as their photographer. Together we take those examples and make them fit our couples individual wedding!
How Far Away Is Your Ceremony And Reception
If you’re getting married in the same place as the reception, you won’t need much extra travel time unless you’re going off-site for photos. But if you’re getting married one one side of the city and having your reception on another, make sure you schedule in extra time for travel!
Think about where you want photos–near the ceremony, near the reception, somewhere in the middle, or somewhere totally different? Mt recommendation is to choose a location you love rather than just choosing what’s the most convenient–these are your wedding photos after all, and making sure you’re absolutely in love with them is so important!
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Start Your Wedding Timeline From Scratch
Every wedding is different, so copying a wedding timeline template you found on the internet word-for-word is probably not going to work for your big day . Start fresh, and use your ceremony time as a starting point. Make a list of all of the events that need to happen before and after the ceremony and then determine how long each of these will take. You can then start to plot your wedding day agenda accordingly. Check out the sample wedding day timeline below as a guide :
Have Someone Check It For You

Making your timeline is a big responsibility, and its one that takes a lot of planning and attention to detail. Make sure you have at least one set of eyes look it over for you before you hit print in order to ensure that it all makes sense. This person can be on the lookout for anything you may have missed or any times that are erroneously overlapping in order to avoid problems.
Once you have your wedding day timeline sorted out, a huge weight will be lifted off your shoulders as you are confident you have a great plan for your big day.
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Compile A List Of All Tasks And Events
Compile a list of everything that will need to take place on your wedding day and separate the list into organized buckets. For instance, have a bucket of pre-wedding activities, which will likely include a hair and makeup schedule, rental deliveries, flower deliveries, and so on. Also have a bucket that exists solely for photography and videography since that timeline can get messy itself. Have a bucket just for your ceremony, one for your cocktail hour, and one for your reception. As you make your list, start organizing each individual bucket into exactly how long you think everything will take and the general order in which it will be done.
Once you have your buckets listed, organize the day into your timeline and put specific times. This will probably take quite a bit of tweaking and editing, so leave yourself ample time to get this done and dont feel like you have to get it all done at once.
/ 1: 45 Confetti Shots
If youre thinking about a confetti shot, which is always a fun and colourful moment at a wedding, after the ceremony can be a great time. Everyone is together and so it can be great time to arrange them for your confetti shot before everywhere spreads out and has a few drinks! For more info and tips on planning an alternative confetti shot, check out my confetti shot planning blog.
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The Best Timeline For Your Wedding Day
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The key to a wedding day timeline that runs smoothly is planning ahead. Breaking down your entire wedding day into an organized timeline helps to keep everything on track when the big day finally arrives. The more detailed you can make the plan, the better. As a rule of thumb, wedding ceremonies typically last 30 minutes to an houralthough short and sweet wedding programs are okay, tooand most wedding receptions typically last four to five hours.
Expert wedding planner Tessa Lyn Brand of Tessa Lyn Events helped us create a sample modern wedding reception timeline based on a wedding starting at 5:30 p.m. .
Meet the Expert
Tessa Lyn Brand is a California-based wedding planner and owner of Tessa Lyn Events. She has planned over 300 weddings.
Note that this wedding timeline also assumes the ceremony and reception are being held at the same venue, which means guests won’t need to travel to a separate party location before cocktail hour can begin. If you’re having your wedding reception at a different site, make sure to add travel time, accounting for the time it will take for the guests to make their way to the post-ceremony festivities.
Use the below as a guide to create your own wedding day timeline.
How Much Time To Plan For Each Part Of Your Wedding Day
Well HEYY FRIEND!!
I’m here to help you tackle some wedding day timeline tips & make some suggestions! Are you as pumped as I am!!?? Or did I just have wayyyy too many iced coffees before writing this?!
It is important to remember that this is your day and you can do whatever the hell your heart desires! And to remember that it is hard to follow a very strict schedule on your wedding day, but it is important to make sure that you have allotted enough time for everything as well.
Ok first off I want to talk about each time of the day and how long each portion normally takes on my end so that when you do sit down to plan it you can refer back to this blog post about the ideal lengths! Of course as mentioned these are all just suggestions. I always just want to give you as much information as I can to be able to provide you with the best photos on your day! I have learned from my mistakes and one of them was not allotting enough time for our own wedding photos on our day. I regret it SO much! Not just because of having a smaller gallery, but because we didn’t allot enough time for just us on our day! We were constantly moving from place to place and chatting with so many people that there were very few times we could just stop, and enjoy each other. Ultimately, you need to enjoy your day, whatever that may look like!
And after we go over all of that we will dive into some tips I have for the entire planning of it all!
GRAB A DRINK AND LETS GET STARTED!
TIME LENGHT AMOUNTS
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Your Getting Ready Timeline
Below is a sample timeline with a first look . If your ceremony starts at 3:30pm, 4:30pm, or 5pm, just adjust the times below by the appropriate amount of time.
- 12:00pm: Candid photos of bride getting hair/make up done.
- 12:45pm: Bride completely finished with hair and makeup.
- 12:45pm: Photos of girls in robes/pajamas, champagne toast
- 01:00pm: Groom gets ready
- 01:15pm: Bride gets into dress
- 01:35pm: Bride first look with father, brother, mom, etc…
- 01:50pm: Bride gets ready for first look with groom
- 02:00pm: First look
- 03:00pm: Family photos
- 03:15pm: Bride tucked away to freshen up while guests arrive
- 03:30pm: Photographer captures photos of ceremony details and guests arriving
- 04:00pm: Ceremony starts
- 04:30pm: Visit with friends and family at cocktail hour
- 05:40pm: Reception
A good to rule to follow for weddings where everything takes place at the same location is to do the first look 2 hours before your ceremony start time.
Below is a sample timeline with no first look :
As you can see from these very realistic sample timelines, there is simply more time for bride and groom photos if you do a first look. There are also many more opportunities to capture candid photos since you will have more time with your family and friends. We do not say this to persuade you into doing a first look. We just want to be as honest as possible, provide you with the information, and then allow you to make the decision that fits best with your wants and needs.
How long do things take?