Agree the order early,
and the speeches run to time.

If you have never sat through a formal wedding, the sequence can look like an inside joke. It is simpler than that. In the English-speaking tradition there are three speeches, one after another, each ending with a toast, so the room always knows when one has finished and another is about to start.

The father of the bride goes first: he welcomes the guests, says something about his daughter, and toasts the couple. The groom replies on behalf of the two of them, with thanks to both families and to the people who travelled, and a toast to the attendants. The best man closes. He is the groom's closest friend, the one who keeps him calm and holds the rings, and at the microphone he tells the stories nobody else would, reads out messages from guests who could not come, and toasts the couple again.

That is a shape, not a law. In some places the order runs differently, in some there are no formal speeches at all, and in plenty of families the person who raised the bride is not her father. What survives every version is the structure: someone welcomes, the couple thank, someone warm closes, and every part ends with a toast.

Most weddings now put both partners on their feet. Sometimes they speak together, trading paragraphs; more often one goes and the other follows, and the second speech is usually the better one because the room has already warmed up. If only one of you wants to speak, say so early rather than letting the assumption sit.

The second common change is a parent from each side rather than one father. It reads as fair, it gives the other family its moment, and it costs you five minutes. Keep the two apart in the running order, because two parental speeches back to back sound like the same speech twice. Put one of you, or a friend, in between.

The third is no best man at all. Plenty of couples have no wedding party and the room does not miss it. A close friend from each side, a sibling, or one person you both love can take the closing slot; all that slot has to do is finish warm and propose the last toast. If the person who would have spoken has died, a sentence in your own speech carries them better than a gap in the order does.

This is the only decision in the running order with consequences outside the room, and it turns on two things that never appear on a schedule: what the kitchen is doing, and how much everyone has had to drink.

Speeches before the meal are kindest to your speakers. Nobody has been drinking for three hours, the room is sharp, and the nervous ones get it over with. The cost lands on the kitchen. Your caterer has a window in which the first course is plated; if the speeches run twenty minutes long, that food waits under a lamp or arrives cold, and every course after it slides too. This slot only works if you genuinely hold people to time.

Between courses spreads the load: one speech after the starter, one after the main, one with dessert. The kitchen gets fixed breaks it can plan around, and no single block of talking is long enough to lose the room. The cost falls on the speakers, who eat in pieces and spend the whole dinner waiting, and on the pace, which never quite settles.

After the meal is the traditional slot and the warmest audience you will get. It is also an audience that has been drinking since the ceremony, and so, usually, is the person holding the microphone. The same speech runs longer after dinner than it would have before it, and nobody intends that. Ask the caterer before you decide. They have run more of these evenings than you have, and they will tell you plainly which version their kitchen can hold.

Five to seven minutes is the length nobody complains about. Ten is the ceiling. Past that a speech stops being a speech and becomes a performance, and it has to be very good to survive the difference.

Be blunt about the timing, because "keep it short" means twenty minutes to someone who enjoys an audience. At around eight minutes the back tables start talking. At ten, people slip out to the toilet, children get taken outside, and glasses start clinking. The noise floor rises, the speaker hears it, and one of two things follows: they rush the ending and lose their best line, or they dig in and push through, which is worse. None of this is about the writing. A brilliant speech at twelve minutes lands worse than an ordinary one at six.

Add it up before you commit to a list. Three speeches at seven minutes, plus introductions, toasts and the settling in between, is roughly half an hour of the room sitting still. Five speakers is closer to fifty minutes, and fifty minutes is where a good evening starts leaking people to the bar. Give each speaker a number of minutes rather than an adjective, and leave a card at the top table with the order and the times on it.

Three is the classic, four is comfortable, five is a lot and six is a session. The arithmetic is not only the extra minutes. Every additional speaker brings the handover, the walk, the microphone, the joke about the previous speaker and the two minutes the room takes to settle again. A sixth speaker costs you ten minutes, not six.

The pressure never comes from the list you wrote. It comes from the uncle who mentions at the engagement party that he has a few words prepared, and from the friend who simply assumes. Close the list early and close it as a couple, so nobody can go round one of you to the other. One answer, given by both of you, ends the conversation. Two different answers start a campaign.

The polite close is a reason that has nothing to do with the person asking. Saying you are keeping it to three so everyone is dancing by nine is true, is about the evening rather than about them, and cannot really be argued with. Then offer somewhere else to put it: a toast at the dinner the night before, a reading in the ceremony, a note in the guest book. Most people who offer a speech want to be seen to matter, and that can be arranged without handing over the microphone.

Send every speaker the same message about a month out: long enough to write something, close enough that the details stay in their head. It has to carry six things. Where they come in the order and who is immediately before them. How many minutes they have. Whether they are proposing a toast, and to whom. Whether there is a microphone, and what kind. Where to stand. And anything the room should not hear.

That last one is the awkward line, and it is the one that saves you. Write it plainly: a name not to mention, a job someone has just lost, a bereavement in one of the families, a story from the stag weekend that was funny at the time. Speakers are not mind readers, and the ones most likely to blunder are the ones who have known you longest. Nobody has ever taken offence at being told.

A week before, send one more line confirming the time has not moved, or that it has. Speakers rehearse against a time, and if the ceremony has slipped by half an hour, the friend who wrote to fill a seven-minute slot before dinner should hear it from you rather than find out at the venue. It is a small job that only exists in the last month, which is where a checklist earns its keep. The full sequence, from arrivals to the last dance, is laid out in the order of the day guide.

A guest who does not know speeches are coming is a guest at the bar when they start. They take the phone call outside, walk a child to the toilet, order a round for the table. None of it is rude. They simply had no way of knowing the next half hour was spoken for.

So put the running order somewhere guests can read it before the day. In Vowly that is the schedule on the guest page, the same page they used to reply, and it can say as little as dinner at seven, speeches at half past eight. Because it is a live page rather than a printed card, when the ceremony moves and everything after it moves too, you change the time once and every guest sees the new one. Guests read it in their own language, which matters at a wedding where half the room is travelling and the speeches will be in a language they are working to follow.

It also fixes the drift of people returning to their seats in ones and twos: if the page says speeches start at half past eight, most of the room is sitting down by twenty-five past. There is more on what belongs on that page in the guide to the guest information page.

One microphone, tested at the real volume with the real speakers, not with the DJ's voice at soundcheck. A handheld beats a clip-on for people who gesture and beats a stand for people who need something to hold. Decide who physically owns it and hands it on, or you will spend three minutes untangling a lead between every speech.

Somebody has to introduce. A toastmaster, the venue's floor manager, the DJ or one cheerful, carrying voice among your friends will do, but it cannot be nobody: the first line of the evening is asking two hundred people to take their seats, and it has to come from someone the room will listen to. The same person announces each speaker by name and relationship, which is genuinely useful for the half of the room who have no idea who has just stood up.

Where speakers sit matters more than it sounds. If the top table is a straight line facing the room, a speaker at the far end is talking across their own family and turning their back on half the guests. Have them stand to the side of the table, or in front of it, rather than behind it. If you are still drawing the plan, the seating chart guide covers the top table properly.

For the nervous speaker, give the first slot. Dread is worse than the thing itself, and an hour of waiting turns a good speech into a shaky one. Ask them to hold a printed copy, because phone screens lock and dim at the worst moment and a phone in the hand reads as a text message rather than a speech. One drink beforehand, not three. And tell them to find one friendly face near the front and talk to that person, because a room of two hundred is impossible and one person is easy.