Timeline Tips for your Chicago Wedding: How Long Everything Takes
Planning your wedding day timeline is something that no couple should have to do alone. This, after all, might be the first (and hopefully last!) time you’re planning a wedding, so it’s really hard to know what all goes into creating the perfect timeline. Here we wanted to break down for you the estimated times that we normally recommend with wedding planning for the larger, most common events in a wedding.
Tip 1. Let us know EVERYTHING you want to happen on your wedding day!
While planning your timeline, we need to make sure we know all of the things you want to happen on your wedding day. Are you planning a surprise for your family member or friend? Are you changing outfits when the reception gets started? Are you doing a culturally-specific dance? All of the things you want to see and do on your wedding day needs to be written into the timeline to make sure you ACTUALLY have enough time for everything. We want to make sure that it’s all going to work out by estimating the timing ahead of time, so your vendors don’t have to charge you late fees because we didn’t account for the extra things in your wedding day!
Tip 2. Listen to your vendor’s recommendations
We have lots of experience with knowing the ins and outs of a wedding day timeline, and our goal is to make sure your wedding day runs as smoothly as possible. If your photographer says they need 2.5 hours for photos after the ceremony, then you need to take that into consideration to get the best bang for your buck while you are paying a hefty bill to make it all happen. If your caterer says that your 250 person plated meal will take 2 hours, you have to understand that there won’t be many ways we can “cut that down”, because of the service time for the food to be made, plated, and served. We can find alternatives to some things, but we really want to let you know what you can realistically expect for your wedding day.
Tip 3. Remember the 30/5 rule
Many things on your wedding day will take drastically different amounts of time than you might expect. The things you think will be 5 minutes will sometimes take up to 30 minutes. If you normally get dressed in 5 minutes, don’t be surprised if that actually takes 30. This is something to keep in mind with ALL of the parts of your timeline to make sure you’re not cutting things too short.
Tip 4. Build backwards from your ceremony time
We always start creating our timelines with your ceremony start time in mind and then working backwards to make sure we know how much time we ACTUALLY have to allot in the morning. If your ceremony is at 5pm, then we need the wedding party to have arrived and are hanging out in one location by 4:30pm, then we need to know the travel time to get from the photo location to the venue, then plan for 1.5 hours for your couple’s and wedding party photos, your first looks and getting dressed, and then your hair/makeup end time that we need, and then seeing how long the services take to get your hair/makeup start time. Then, the evening also revolves around the ceremony time - cocktail hour, welcome speeches and formalities, dinner, speeches, and dancing, then all the way to your reception end time. There are plenty of times you’ll need to consider too!
Tip 5. Use our recommendations for building the timeline
We know generally how long each thing will take - here are some of the key components to many of our timelines that we use:
Hair/Makeup: 1 hour per service
Some hair and makeup artists actually say that it can be less than this timeframe, but it’s easier to add in extra time than to not have enough. Especially for hair and makeup being the first thing to start your day - you don’t want to literally start on a bad note and set everything after that off the path because you didn’t account enough time. We also like to add in extra buffer time for people to get situated after the hair and makeup to clean up their belongings, get ready for the day, and just make sure if hair/makeup is running behind that we don’t have to make up lost time.
Photo/Video arrival: 1 hour before hair/makeup is complete
Typically, your photographer and/or videographer is going to want to arrive about 1 hour before you finish up with your hair and makeup to provide enough time to get everyone comfortable, take photos of you getting your hair and makeup done, and for photographing the details of your day (invitations, shoes, veil, accessories, etc.). They may even want more time, but we usually talk with your team about when they think is best to arrive also based on the start time of dancing so they have enough time to photograph everything you need.
Getting dressed: 30 minutes
We always put a minimum of 30 minutes to get dressed and get yourself ready for the big day. We don’t want you to feel rushed right off the bat, and if there are any groomsmen that are missing a cufflink, or you can’t find your shoes, it gives you enough time to physically get dressed and hopefully tie up any of those other loose ends. We don’t want to allot too much time in the morning to make you feel antsy, but we do want you to feel like you can be leisurely while getting ready for your wedding.
First look: 10-15 minutes per first look
First looks don’t typically take more than a few minutes, but if you are doing one it often rolls right into your couple’s photos anyway, and the more time you have for those, the more full your photo album will be with a variety of poses and locations. Even if you’re doing a more documentary-style wedding day, you’ll likely have enough time to really soak in that intimate moment with whoever you’re doing the first looks with if you allot extra time for these, instead of feeling like you have to jump from one thing to the next without taking a breath.
Couple’s photos: 1 hour
We always tell our couples that they need a minimum of 1 hour for photos of just the two of you. After all, your wedding day is to celebrate you and your love, so it’s important to capture that because that will be the only thing you can physically keep from your wedding day! Having any less time will make it difficult for your photographers and videographers to really get you comfortable and get really nice shots of you, but of course if you allot more time that will make things more relaxed too! You also have to take into account any travel time you’ll need to go from one photo location to another, not including the hour for the photos themselves.
Wedding party photos: 30 minutes
Depending on the size of your wedding party, we always recommend somewhere around 20-30 minutes for your photos with all of the wedding party together, each side of the wedding party, and then the individual photos with each person. Of course if you only have 3 people on each side, this won’t require as much time as it would with 9 people on each side. We always defer to your photo/video team to make sure they have time for everything they will need!
Ceremony: 30-60 minutes
Most wedding ceremonies are blocked off for either 30 or 60 minute timeframes. Most religious ceremonies are in that 60 minute time because of all of the pieces of the ceremony, but a classic, non-religious ceremony usually is somewhere between 15-30 minutes from the start of the processional to the end of the recessional. We definitely recommend asking your officiant how long they expect it to take to make sure that your drinks and apps are ready when you finish the ceremony if it’s going to be quick!
Dinner: 1-2 hours
Depending on the service style, guest count, how many courses you’ll have, and how many speeches, your dinner time really is something we recommend asking the caterers about. Something big to keep in mind though is that the caterers tend to not factor in the speech times, so that usually adds another 20-30ish minutes to the time they recommend to you in our experience.
Speeches: 5-15 minutes per speech
We highly recommend telling anyone that is doing a speech that the maximum time that they can talk is 2 minutes. They will almost always nearly double the time limit you provide, and having your guests sit and listen to 2-5 speeches that are each 7-15 minutes can be a bit lame for those who want to get up and dance or just sit and chat. We have seen plenty of maid of honor or father of the bride speeches that have gone on for 15 minutes because the couple forgot to ask them to stick to a time limit, so we highly recommend reiterating this to them a few times. If you would prefer, we have been recommending couples have their speeches at the rehearsal dinner to help get to the dance floor quicker!
Dancing: 3 hours
We always tell couples that anything over 3 hours for dancing will actually start to exhaust your guests. The best timeframe we see is between 2.5-3 hours of dancing, but it’s always good to ask your band or DJ about what they see and recommend too. Most band sets are also 3 hours long, so it usually just makes the most sense to aim for no more than 3 hours!
If you aren’t really sure if you’ve got everything down right, click this link for our spreadsheet we give to all of our couples to create a preliminary timeline before we check all of the logistics over for you. This won’t be an exact science to making sure to account for everything in your wedding day, but it is going to get you closer to the wedding day timeline of your dreams!
There are some factors that we can’t always have nailed down without knowing the specifics of your wedding. Do you have family that is notoriously late so we need to add extra buffer time? Are there any special events happening near your wedding that will influence the traffic on your wedding day? What is the actual time for your sunset that you need to account for for sunset photos? When are the vendors getting served dinner so they can be ready for those sunset photos? Some of these details need to be looked over with a fine-tooth comb to make sure it ACTUALLY makes sense for your specific wedding.
If you need more help wedding planning and want us to really look over the specific details of your wedding day, you can reach out to us at our contact page and we can help you out. We specialize in creating extremely accurate timelines and can definitely help you put yours together too!
