The Ultimate Day-Of Wedding Timeline Guide

Key Tips & Step-by-Step for Seamless Wedding Day Coordination

Planning a wedding is an exciting journey, filled with dreams of your perfect day. However, the path to getting there can be overwhelming, especially if you’re doing all of the planning without the help of a wedding planner.

As someone who recently navigated this adventure on my own, I understand the blend of excitement and anxiety that comes with it. In this article, I’ll share my insider tips and strategies that helped me stay organized and focused, ensuring that every detail was right.

By the way - this article can also be extremely beneficial for those who are planning a wedding with the help of a planner. Although you might have a planner, there’s still a lot that you need to do on your own as well.

Whether you’re in the early stages of planning or knee-deep in decision making, my goal is to help make the process feel a bit more exciting and a lot less stressful. I want to help all brides plan the best day possible, so I’m excited to share my wedding-day timeline that took months in the works to put together and perfect.

The Wedding Day Timeline

There are three key elements to consider when creating your timeline - photography, and hair and makeup schedules. Your photographer has a certain amount of time that they *need* to fulfill their job. Similarly to this, your makeup artists and hair stylists also require a specific amount of time per person. With that said, it’s important to:

1. Start by knowing your invitation call-for time and ceremony-start time.

2. Then let your photographer know what time your invitation is called for and ask when they recommend arriving to begin photos.

3. Then you need to let your makeup artists and hair stylists know what time the photographer arrives so that they can make sure everyone is ready in time for photos.

   1. Note: if your photographer is arriving at a certain time, this doesn’t necessarily mean you need to start taking group photos right when they arrive. They may start with solo photos of just the bride, which means that the Mother of the Bride and/or the Maid of Honor can overlap with this timing.

These three pieces are the foundation of your timeline, and the rest will unfold in an orderly process.

Hair and Makeup Timeline

Below is a screenshot, also linked here, where you can find my standard hair/makeup timeline.

This timeline assumes the following:

• Bride must be ready by 1pm for photos when the photographer arrives

• 5 bridesmaids, 1 Maid of Honor, and 2 mothers (bride and groom).

Our makeup artist requested that each girl has 45 minutes to get their makeup done, and that the bride has an hour and then an additional 30 minutes later in the morning for touch-ups.

Our hair stylists requested that each girl comes with their hair dry, and that they each have 1 hour time slots.

Depending on how many hair stylists and makeup artists you have, along with your bridal party headcount, you will need to adjust this accordingly, but this was an awesome way for us to visualize each girls timing and then relay that to them before the big day so they’d be prepared for how the day would go.

Photographer’s Timeline

The photographer should make this part easy for you because they know how much time they need for each moment. For example, the first-look with the Bridesmaids takes 30 minutes, the first-look with the Father of the Bride takes 15 minutes, the Bride’s first-look with the Groom takes 15 minutes, etc.

So if you tell the photographer what time your ceremony is called for and when it actually begins, along with details such as the venue location, getting ready location, etc., they should be able to send you a high-level photography timeline on their own. But again, if they don’t… no worries, just keep reading :)

The Official Day-Of Timeline

Once you figure out those three pieces, you’re then ready to plug in the missing gaps in your timeline. Coming from experience, I know how overwhelming and scary this can feel. You have the photography schedule, the hair and makeup schedules, the vendors arrival times, the rehearsal, and so much more.

Luckily for you, this timeline linked here has absolutely every detail you can possibly think of on your wedding day. It may look overwhelming from a quick glance, but I can assure you that it’s really difficult to forget anything when you have this in front of you.

Not only does this timeline tell you details like when the photos and videos start, but it also includes all of the details that you don’t necessarily think of - such as when certain vendors are scheduled to arrive and set up, and then a follow-up reminder by a certain hour to give them their tips.

Of course, this timeline was super specific to me, but I tried to make it as generic as possible so that each person can create a copy of their own to use and alter on their wedding day.

This timeline was created for a Jewish ceremony and reception, but again can be changed accordingly. The main takeaway from this timeline is that you won’t just copy and paste this and hand it to your vendors, but rather you should use this as a wealth of information to help guide you in creating your own based off your bridal party, timing, religion, destination and more.

What to do once you’ve finalized your timeline

This next step is also a key piece to a stress-free wedding day. Unfortunately you can’t just have a timeline, pass it along to people and hope that they all follow it. You need to be super selective and choose an individual who can take full responsibility to help orchestrate the day.

This person should *not* be the bride or the groom. It’s so important that the bride and groom really get to take in their day, without any worry about all of the outside factors. The only thing they should be focusing on is soaking in every second of the day.

So find someone you can trust, who you know can take on the responsibility to make sure that everything is running as planned. For me, that person was my dad. He is super organized, and the two of us helped create this timeline together, so I had full faith that he’d be the perfect person to ensure my day would run as smoothly as possible, and he was.

This person doesn’t necessarily have to be a friend or family member, you might even be able to find someone who works for your wedding venue who is able to help with this. So make sure you ask your venue, vendors and all of your resources these sorts of questions about what they’d suggest because remember… they do this all of the time!

As many of you know, I genuinely want to help. Please feel free to send me a DM, drop a comment below or send me a private message with any questions you may have about your wedding day timeline (or anything) that I can help with.

Happy wedding planning!

With love,

Lexi