Put Your Wedding Schedule Online
Most wedding timelines live in the couple's heads and in a planning document nobody else can open. So guests ask — the same handful of questions, one message at a time, for months. A schedule on the wedding website is the cheapest fix in wedding planning: one page, written once, that answers when to arrive, what happens next, and whether Friday is optional.
The schedule guests need is not the one you are building
There are two wedding timelines and they get confused constantly.
The first is the run sheet: supplier call times, when the cake arrives, the twenty minutes reserved for family photographs. It is a working document, it changes weekly, and no guest should ever see it.
The second is the shape of the weekend from a guest's seat. When do I turn up, what happens after that, and is there anything on Friday I am supposed to be at? That is a short list, it barely changes, and it is the one that goes on the website.
Publishing the first by mistake is a common failure. It reads as chaos to anyone who is not running the day, and it invites questions rather than closing them.
What each entry needs
Give every moment its own entry, in order, with four things:
- A title. "Welcome drinks", not "Event 1".
- A start time. If it is not fixed yet, leave the time off rather than inventing one — a moment with no time still tells people it exists.
- A place. The name of the room, house or venue, so people know whether they are moving.
- A line of context. Who it is for, whether it is optional, and anything they need to bring or wear.
That last line does the most work. Most schedule questions are not really "when" — they are "am I invited to this?" and "does this one matter?". Answering it in the entry itself removes an entire category of message.
Say what a guest is meant to do
A schedule is a set of instructions in disguise. So write it as one.
"Ceremony, 3pm, in the orangery. Please be seated by 2:45" beats "Ceremony 3pm" by exactly the amount of time you would otherwise spend telling people to arrive early. The same goes for the end of the night: guests will ask about taxis, last transport and whether there is anything the next morning, and every one of those has a one-line answer you can write now.
Where a moment is only for some guests — a family dinner, a morning-after brunch — say so on the entry rather than leaving people to guess from the guest list.
It will change, so publish it somewhere you can change it
The reason to put a schedule online rather than on a card is not design. It is that times move. Venues shift a slot, a supplier reschedules, dinner runs later than planned, and the guests who need to know are the ones already holding the old version.
A website is the only copy you can correct after it is delivered. That is worth more than it sounds when you also have guests travelling: the person booking a flight around a Friday welcome dinner needs the version that is true today.
On LumiWed, the schedule is a section of the wedding site that you edit on the Content page of the dashboard. Each moment carries a title, an optional start time, a description and a location. Two details are worth knowing:
- A moment can collect its own RSVP. Mark it and guests reply to that event separately, so "coming to the wedding" and "coming to the welcome dinner" are two different answers rather than one you have to infer.
- A moment can be hidden from the guests of chosen languages. If one side of the family is at the church service and the other is not, the entry — and its RSVP — simply is not there for them.
You can also rename the section itself, so it reads "Order of the Day" or whatever your families would call it.
Every language, from one edit
If your guests do not share a language, the schedule is where a hand-translated site fails first, because it is the part that changes most.
LumiWed translates each moment's title and description into every language on the wedding, so one edit reaches all of them. The location name is deliberately left alone — a place name is not prose, and translating it produces an address nobody can find. Times and dates are rendered in the wedding's timezone, with the day written in the guest's own language.
When you change something, only what actually changed is re-translated, and any wording you fixed by hand stays as you wrote it. That is the difference between one schedule and several copies of one: the copies are fine on the day you write them and wrong the first time you move an hour.
What this is not
This is a guest-facing schedule, not a planning tool. There is no twelve-month checklist, no vendor timeline and no budget attached to it — The Knot covers that ground and does it well (verified August 2026), and a wedding website is the wrong shape for it.
What the site is for is the version your guests read. Write that one, put it up early, and change it in place when the day moves.
FAQ
How do I share a wedding timeline with guests?
Publish it as a schedule on your wedding website, one entry per moment, with a start time and a location. Send the link once; a page you can edit beats a timeline pasted into a group chat that nobody can find again.
Can I change the schedule after invitations go out?
Yes, and you should expect to. The point of putting it on a website is that the version guests read is the current one — on LumiWed an edit updates every language of the site rather than only the one you typed in.
What belongs in a guest schedule, and what does not?
Guests need the moments they are part of: arrival, ceremony, dinner, party, and anything on the days either side. Supplier call times, hair and makeup slots and the photographer's shot list belong in the run sheet, not on the site.
Resources
