How to Start Planning a Wedding
If you have finally made the life-changing decision to get married, then you might be thinking about how to start planning a wedding. This means creating memories that you will treasure for life. You can only do that if you plan your wedding as perfectly as possible. We have written a comprehensive guide to wedding planning here in this article. It will help you to understand what you need to do to ensure everything goes smoothly.
Your wedding will be one of the biggest events in your life, and you may never have thought about how to plan for a wedding before. Some people choose to get eloped instead of having a wedding. But if you choose to have a wedding it can seem like an overwhelming challenge to plan everything. But it does not have to be, even if you have only got months to spare before your wedding is scheduled. If you are concerned about time, then some actionable advice upfront is to give some of the duties to people you trust, like friends and family. They know you well enough to follow your wishes as you would like.
We have provided a list so that you can learn how to plan a wedding step by step. It will walk you through where to start when planning a wedding, as well as all the other essential tasks that you need to handle. Our goal is for this wedding planning guide to be one that you are glad you found and can use as a reference in the months to come.
Here is our full list of 20 steps:
1. Decide How Much It Will Cost
There are many different elements involved in a wedding, and these include the costs of photographing weddings, the outfits for the bride and groom, hiring a location, and providing food and drink at the reception later on. If you do not plan everything, you could run out of money and end up only having some of what you wanted. The best way to deal with this is to have a discussion with the most important wedding attendees, decide who is contributing money, and choose what you are going to buy. Doing this in advance prevents you from having to make last-minute changes. For example if your dream is to fly on a private jet, you need to know how much it’ll cost.
2. Visualize It
When you plan your own wedding, a great way to start is by researching what you would like the occasion to look like, and how to trigger the emotions you want to be feeling. This might mean you want a professional and carefully structured wedding or one that takes an easy and gentle approach. You can use social media to find pictures and videos that you can use for inspiration, and you can use the Internet to find websites that specialize in helping people design their weddings. If you do this as soon as possible, it saves time later.
3. Select Who You Want to Attend
It is one of the smaller aspects of planning your wedding, but you must know who is coming and who is not before you arrange anything specific. Some weddings are small and private, whereas others involve the whole community. This means your wedding may have a few dozen people, or a few hundred. The scale of your wedding will make an impact on everything else. It is also important to make sure your chosen location can fit in all the people you’d like to invite. After this, you will want to assign the crucial roles within the wedding, like bridesmaids.
4. Pick A Date
When you make arrangements to attend a venue, you will have to choose the exact date and time for your wedding to begin. It is important to take this into account during your wedding planning. Before you place a reservation with your chosen venue, it is worth keeping in mind the range of dates you’d like to have your wedding on. For example, you might like to have it at a particular time of year or to use a particular day of the week. Weekends are more popular, so you will need to book long in advance for those. You will also need to consider the commitments of your most important guests.
5. Determine Your Location
After you have followed the above steps, it will be time to take the plunge and commit to a specific venue. This will be one of the biggest decisions you have to make, and it is one of the most crucial stages in our wedding planning guide. Luckily, most major venues will have reviews from those who have been married there in the past. These are extremely valuable because they will give you an indication of whether the atmosphere is right for you. Another useful tip is to attend the venue yourself so that you can get a feel for it and take your partner with you on a second occasion.
6. Begin the Registry
This is a record of where and when you and your partner got engaged. It is something that people often ask about after you go public with an engagement. By having a registry, your wedding guests are notified so that they can purchase gifts. This helps ensure that everybody is informed and has enough time to prepare.
7. Make A Website and a Hashtag
Now that the world is digital, the easiest way to make sure everyone is on the same page is to create a website. You can post regular updates, set up an email list, and coordinate invitations. If you do this, it is worth creating a separate page with details about the location and time, plus information on where guests can park their cars and book hotel rooms. If you want to go even further, you can use a hashtag to coordinate posts on social media.
8. Hire Your Vendors
It is common for couples to hire over a dozen vendors who can help to provide the resources and input necessary to make a wedding successful. The best way to get high-quality vendors is to use the Internet to find reviews from others who have used them. If you are hesitant about booking lots of vendors, then it’s worth remembering that the more help you have, the better your wedding will be
9. Confirm Your Guests
Using the guest list that you made in step three, it is now time to confirm who can make it and who cannot. If relatives or friends have helped to fund the wedding, then they will usually want to influence the final list. You will also need to remember how many people your venue can contain so that you don’t have more people coming than it’s possible to accommodate.
10. Remind Guests
Even if your wedding is months away, it is crucial that your guests remember when it’s happening and can take time out of their schedules to attend. Therefore, you should politely request that they add your wedding dates to their calendar.
11. Buy Your Clothes
A wedding is not just remembered because of the venue and activities, but also the special outfits worn by the bride and groom. Choosing the right clothes is another essential step in planning your own wedding. It can take a long time to make a final decision, so you will want to do this relatively early on.
12. Plan the Dinner
Before a wedding takes place, it is traditional to host a rehearsal dinner the evening before the wedding. It is often the responsibility of the groom, but this needs to be confirmed, as does the details regarding who will pay for the event. This is worth getting arranged half a year before your wedding so that it goes as smoothly as possible.
13. Make Honeymoon Arrangements
When you are thinking about how to plan a wedding step by step, it can be easy to forget what comes after. This will, of course, be the honeymoon. If you are planning to travel abroad for this, then you will have to get everything set up so that you can get started after the wedding is over. That means planning where you will stay, how long it will be, and what you will do.
14. Deal with Other Events
During the period before a wedding, there is usually plenty of occasions that need to be attended. These include engagement celebrations, bachelor parties, and others. This means that you will be very busy during the months leading up to your wedding. That is why we have emphasized long-term thinking in this wedding planning guide.
15. Issue the Invites
Invitations for guests are generally sent several weeks ahead of the event, usually more than a month before. Guests usually have a few weeks to reply, but the deadline for this is typically 2–3 weeks before the wedding.
16. Get Your Jewelry
Wedding bands are a major element of every wedding, and these are something you and your partner should choose privately before your wedding. It should fit snugly as you will have it on constantly and should be in line with your preferences.
17. Make A Seating Plan
It is important to decide where you want your guests to sit. You might like your family members to be nearer the front, or to share a table with them at the reception. You can usually use the website of your venue to do this interactively so that you can get a visual representation of where people will be sitting. If some of your guests are unlikely to get on well, make sure you seat them far apart. It can also be useful to get some seating cards made so that people can easily find their place.
18. Get Licensed
Getting married is not as simple as turning up to the venue and going through the proceedings there. You need to stay on the right side of the law and have a license. The details will differ depending on where you live, so it is worth doing your research. Sometimes there is a queue that means you will need to wait before you get one. That makes it important to factor in at an early stage. It is also a requirement if you would like to change names after getting married.
19. Finalize Everything
Now that you have planned everything down to the finest details, you need to inform all the relevant individuals and organizations that you are going ahead with the plan. This means updating everyone with the correct information and issuing payments to all the vendors. If you feel like what you have read in this wedding planning guide is overwhelming, you might like to consider getting a wedding planner to help.
20. Marry Your Partner!
Once your special day arrives, you will be able to get married and hopefully live together for the rest of your lives. With a plan in place, you can relax and enjoy the magical experience to come. Then you want to consider your honeymoon and where you’d like to book your hotel for.
