Where to Start Wedding Planning

Getting engaged is an incredibly exciting time. You’re taking the next step to spend the rest of your life with your best friend. The wedding is a celebration of that commitment you’re taking with your partner. No matter whether you eventually decide to elope or have a blowout wedding, the location, or anything else about the format or style, your wedding will reflect the two of you and the life you’re creating together.

We’ve discussed the first things to do after getting engaged before, and if you haven’t read that short list, we encourage you to do so. It’s good to take some time to soak in and celebrate this milestone. But once you start feeling ready to kick off the wedding planning process, you might start thinking, “now what!?”

We’ve been there. The wedding planning process is exciting, but it can also be overwhelming with the number of decisions and investments that must be made—that’s actually what led us to found Built by Brides! If you’re like us, you’re looking to plan most of the wedding yourself. Getting a strong start to the process is an important step to set the foundation for a seamless wedding planning experience.

Now that you’re ready to officially start the planning process, here are our recommended next steps to get started.

Start by downloading our FREE! Wedding Planning Checklist to organize every step needed to plan your own wedding, then continue reading to follow along with our full advice.

We recommend tackling the below steps in order and between 10-12 months out from your anticipated wedding date, if not earlier. Depending on where you’re getting married, some vendors book up a year or more in advance, so getting a head start is always helpful. Once you’re done, come back for our next explainer on what to do 7-9 months out!

1. Plan your budget.

2. Narrow down your wedding city and season.

3. Write a draft guest list to estimate how many people you’ll want your wedding to accommodate.

4. Determine whether you’ll have a religious or non-religious ceremony.

5. Create a wedding-specific email address.

6. Get organized (timeline, planners)

7. Determine whether you want to book a full wedding planner or do most of the planning yourself.

8. OPTIONAL: Determine the style of the wedding.

9. Research, visit, and book your wedding venue.

10. Book a photographer and videographer.

11. Take engagement pictures.

12. Have an engagement party.

If you’ve already read our prior blogs, you may have done these first steps. If not or if they need revisiting, this is the best place to start. These first steps focus more on aligning you and your partner’s expectations. We recommend setting a date for you two to sit down after dinner, share a glass of wine, and dream up your ideal celebration.

1. Plan your budget.

Have conversations with your partner about what is realistic for you to comfortably spend on your wedding and discuss with any family who may be contributing as well. It’s important to be up front and transparent here; clear communication about finances will save you a headache and frustration down the line.

Two important notes. First, there is a good chance you will go over budget. We recommend picking a number that you’d still be comfortable going 20% over. Try not to use that buffer, but there will always be unforeseeable situations that arise, and if they cause additional fees, you’ll be glad to have mentally prepared for a higher number. Secondly, determine whether the budget number you’re aiming for is meant to cover the day of the wedding or if it’s for everything related to the wedding. When we first started researching our target budget, we found national wedding data misleading until we realized that most reported national averages for weddings are only for the ceremony and reception. There are many other expenses, from your accommodation to your attire, that need to be accounted for.

2. Narrow down your wedding city and season.

Where you want to get married and the time of year will have a huge influence on how many guests will be able to attend, the cost of putting on the wedding, and various accommodations you’ll need to make for the wedding to be comfortable. If you are hoping to get married in a tourist destination, for example, picking a wedding date during peak season will make everything more expensive and challenging to book for both you and your guests. However, booking it off season will help you all get a good deal and entice your guests to turn your wedding into a vacation. Additionally, not only does the season influence the pricing, but it will also influence any additional accommodation or rentals that need to be booked. If you’re looking at a winter date, you might need to book space heaters or a tent to keep the space warm.

3. Write a draft guest list to estimate how many people you’ll want your wedding to accommodate.

There’s no need to finalize this now, but discussing who you want at your wedding will help you pick a venue that’s the right size. There’s nothing worse than picking out an incredible venue only for it to be half the size you need, or for it to be so big your guests won’t fill the space!

It also takes a surprising amount of time to finalize the guest list and collect addresses. Be prepared; finalizing the guest list is often one of the most stressful parts of wedding planning for couples. Whether you have an extensive family who all expect an invite or friends of friends who want to know the venue before you’ve even finalized it, managing a guest list is no small feat. Getting a head start will help you handle potentially difficult situations as they arise.

4. Determine whether you’ll have a religious or non-religious ceremony.

Whether you have a religious ceremony or not will influence a surprising number of wedding planning steps. A religious ceremony will influence the type of venue you select, and you may need to be more flexible on the timing of your wedding based on the availability of any required venues. Certain religions also require different levels of pre-marital counseling that must be started by a certain number of months ahead of your wedding date. Decide this early so that you don’t miss deadlines required for your marriage to be recognized by your place of worship.

5. Create a wedding-specific email address.

This is by far one of our biggest tips to help you stay organized. Before you know it, your inbox will be flooded with messages from vendors, newsletters you may have subscribed to, and even emails between you and your partner. Creating an email address will then give you one spot where everything is stored. We recommend creating a Gmail for this because in addition to a free email, you will also have a shared drive with significant storage that you can use to save photos, documents, and contracts throughout the planning process.

Once the above steps are done, it’s time to start reaching out to vendors. These next steps will set the tone and timeline for the remainder of the planning and of the wedding itself.

We also want to share a forewarning that these next steps are some of the biggest steps. They might take more time and cause more frustration than you realized. As you work through each step, remember those beginning conversations you had with your partner about your expectations for the wedding to help you stay focused and grounded.

6. Get organized.

The best gift you can give yourself early in the wedding process is a method to organize the information, inspiration, and other research you’ve collected. Start by downloading our FREE! Wedding Planning Checklist if you haven’t already or purchase a planner that will guide you through the planning process and help you identify which steps to complete by certain deadlines.

On the note of starting a wedding-specific email address, we highly recommend doing so through Google so that you also have access to the shared drive. Not only does it make it easy to store everything in one place, but the drive can also be shared between you and your partner as well as any future vendors who need access to certain information.

7. Determine whether you want to book a full wedding planner or do most of the planning yourself.

We recommend making this decision before anything else because if you do decide to hire a full wedding planner, they can be instrumental in helping you identify your ideal wedding style and book vendors they trust will be able to execute beyond your expectations. You might decide after doing research that you don’t want to hire a full planner but rather a month or day-of coordinator, in which case you can push this step until later in the process. Even with that, though, planners and coordinators book up quickly. If you find a planner that you think you’ll want to use down the line, we recommend booking them right away.

8. OPTIONAL: Determine the style of the wedding.

We have a hard time cementing this into your checklist because we encourage every bride to keep an open mind about what the wedding day will look like. Once you start looking at venues, you might be surprised by the different styles and formats they offer. You also might be overwhelmed by what might be required to transform certain spaces to match what your original vision was. Do you best to limit your expectations and focus on finding a space you can both envision saying your vows and dancing the night away.

With that said, there are some super fun resources that can help you get a feel for the different styles of weddings you can keep an eye out for. One of our favorites is The Knot’s Wedding Style Quiz. It allows you to sift through different types of venues, themes, and colors depending on your preferences. We love the idea of taking this separately from your partner and then comparing answers to get a good understanding of both of your styles and priorities.

9. Research, visit, and book your wedding venue.

This can be one of the most exciting yet daunting steps. Picking your venue means locking in a wedding date, and it also sets the tone for your wedding style. However, there are endless venues to choose from. Restaurants, art museums, zoos, hotels, gardens… part of keeping an open mind to your wedding style also allows you to be creative with the type of venue you’re looking at.

If you’re feeling overwhelmed, set some boundaries for yourself. If there are noise curfews but you want to dance at your reception until late at night, focus on venues that have an indoor space. If you are planning most of the wedding yourself but are worried about staying organized or having enough time to do so, focus on venues that come with packages, like hotels or restaurants which come with catering and staff too.

10. Book a photographer and videographer.

When it comes to capturing your wedding, we strongly believe that your family and friends’ phone pictures won’t do your celebration justice. There are so many options of who to hire that this is an investment worth its price. Looking for something more budget-friendly? Hire a social content creator. Interested in both videography and photography? You can hire both independently, but there are a lot of companies that either do both in-house or work closely with others to make it easy to find both vendors with a consistent style.

When it comes to booking vendors, we always recommend setting up calls to meet who you’ll be working with. With your photographer and videographer, we found those meetings to be especially helpful. It gives you an opportunity to better understand their creative process and style, and you’ll get to confirm whether your personalities mesh. Don’t forget they’ll spend anywhere from 6 to 12 hours with you on your big day!

11. Take engagement pictures.

We’ll admit it. This one doesn’t have to happen 10+ months out from the wedding and some couples elect not to do them at all. However, we’ve found that taking engagement pictures early gives you more time to enjoy them and use them throughout your planning. Having an engagement party? Include a picture in your invitation! They’ll also then be ready for future steps, like Save-the-Dates and your wedding website.

Additionally, taking engagement pictures serves as a practice run for your wedding day photography. After a quick hour session with your photographer or videographer, you’ll become much more comfortable with them and their shooting style so that you’ll have a better understanding of how your big day will be captured.

12. Have an engagement party.

We love an excuse to celebrate, and your engagement is a perfect one! Your family and friends will also want to celebrate with you, so whether it’s formal or not, throwing an engagement party is a perfect way to kick off wedding planning. Celebrating milestones along the way is one of the best ways to focus on the joy of your relationship and not get too caught up in the to-do lists. Take a breather for a weekend and celebrate!

We’re so excited for you to embark on the wedding planning process, and we hope we can be helpful every step of the way. Stay tuned for future articles and resources that outline what comes next in the wedding planning. If you’re 10-12 (or even more!) months out, though, this is all you need to get started.