Wedding day of timeline generator

The ceremony time is the only fixed point on a wedding day, so this builds everything else around it. Type the time your ceremony starts and every row moves with it — hair and make-up, the photographer arriving, the ceremony, the first look if you tick that box, the cocktail hour, the entrance, dinner, speeches, the first dance and the send-off. Nothing here is a list printed on the page: each line is an offset in minutes from the time you entered, which is why you can try a one o’clock ceremony and a four o’clock ceremony and watch what each does to the end of the night. Every offset is a planning convention — the spacing photographers, caterers and venues usually work to — and not a measured statistic. Treat the result as a first draft to argue with.

Two of the fields change the shape of the day rather than sliding it. The first look is the bigger one. Tick it and the portraits move in front of the ceremony, which pulls the hair and make-up call an hour earlier and brings the cocktail hour down to sixty minutes, because nobody has to disappear during it. Leave it unticked and the cocktail hour is ninety, because your portraits and the family photographs have to fit inside it. That is the trade people miss when they copy a timeline off a blog: a ninety-minute drinks reception is not a stylistic choice, it is where the photographs went.

The other is travel. Untick the same-venue box and the generator inserts a journey after the confetti and pushes everything downstream by the minutes you choose. Measure that journey on a Saturday at the real hour, not on a weekday morning, and pad it.

Work backwards, not forwards. If the send-off lands after a time your venue will not allow — most have a curfew written into the contract — move the ceremony earlier rather than shaving fifteen minutes off four different blocks. Blocks cut that way do not stay cut. Three of them reliably run long and are worth guarding: leaving the ceremony, because a hundred people saying congratulations takes a quarter of an hour; the family photographs, which overrun whenever nobody holds a named list and nobody is loud enough to gather people; and the move from drinks to a seated dinner, which takes longer than anyone budgets and happens twice when the room has to be turned around.

Send the finished schedule to the photographer, the caterer and the venue before any guest sees it. Each will want a block moved, and each is right — they know their own service times. What guests need is much shorter: the ceremony time, roughly when dinner is, and when the night ends. They do not need your hair and make-up call. Put that guest version somewhere it can still change, because it will change. On a printed card the schedule is fixed in ink; on a digital invitation you edit one page and everyone who opens the link sees the new times, including the guests who opened it last month.