Setting one of these up takes about an hour of actual work, spread over however many weeks you need. The mistakes people make are almost all mistakes of order: doing things in the wrong sequence, and discovering too late that an earlier decision has closed off a later one.
So here is the sequence.
Step 1. Decide where the plaque is going, before anything else
This decision governs everything after it: whether you need permission, how long it will take, and what it costs.
- Urn, frame or memory box at home. No permission. Start immediately. See the guide for ashes and urns.
- Bench on private land. No permission.
- Bench on council land. Scheme application, often six months or more.
- Headstone in a council cemetery. Permit, mason, and the grave deed holder's consent. See the headstone rules guide.
- Churchyard. Diocesan regulations, and possibly a faculty. See the churchyard guide.
Step 2. Get permission before you buy anything
If it is going anywhere public, make the phone call now. Not after the plaque arrives.
Two calls settle it: the cemeteries office or the parish priest, and then a local accredited mason. Fifteen minutes, and you will know whether you are ordering a plaque or reconsidering the location.
Ordering first and asking afterwards is the single most common way this goes wrong, and it is entirely avoidable.
Step 3. Choose the finish
Size is functional rather than decorative, and it is worth understanding why the plaque is the size it is. A code scans from roughly ten times its own width, so an 80mm plaque reads comfortably from about a metre. That is close enough for an urn or a picture frame, and far enough for a bench, a garden marker, or a memorial set back behind a kerb or planted border, where somebody reads it standing or seated rather than crouching.
On finish, brushed steel is the safe default and brushed black gives the highest contrast against pale stone. Full reasoning in the durability guide.
Our memorial plaque with memory page comes in 80mm, in brushed steel or brushed black, at £70, with the page included.
Consider adding the name and dates. An unengraved code is anonymous, and a passer-by has no reason to scan a blank disc. With a name beside it, the plaque means something before anyone lifts a phone, and it still means something to a person with no phone at all.
Step 4. Gather the material
Do this while the plaque is being made, so the two run in parallel.
Look in these places, roughly in this order of what people forget:
- Your own phone. Search their name in your photos app. Most people are surprised by how much is there.
- Other people's phones. Ask the family to send anything with them in it. This is where the good ones are, because you have already seen all of yours.
- Old prints. A phone photograph of a print, flat, in daylight, no flash, is good enough. Do not wait to borrow a scanner.
- Voicemails and video. The most valuable thing you can find and the thing most often lost. Check old handsets in drawers before anyone wipes them. Background audio in a family video, where they are talking off camera, counts.
- Documents. Letters, a recipe in their handwriting, a work ID card, the order of service.
Set a low target. Ten photographs and one story is a real memorial page. You are not compiling an archive today.
Step 5. Build the page
Put up five things: one photograph, their name as people actually said it, the dates, a sentence about who they were, and one story. Publish it. Add to it forever.
The reason to publish something small immediately is that a page which exists gets added to, and a page waiting to be done properly never gets done at all. This is by a wide margin the most common failure, and the details of what to include, what to leave off, and the identity-fraud risk to avoid are all in what to include on a memorial page.
If you cannot face it, do not force it. Send us what you have and change it later.
Step 6. Test the code before you fix it
Almost nobody does this and it takes four minutes.
When the plaque arrives, before any adhesive comes out, take it to where it is going and test it there. Not on the kitchen table in good light. In the actual place, in the actual weather.
- Scan it on more than one phone. Ideally an iPhone and an Android, and ideally one older handset.
- Scan it at the real distance, standing where a visitor would stand.
- Scan it in direct sun, if the location gets any. Glare is the commonest cause of a code that works indoors and fails outdoors, and it is entirely about the angle you mount it at.
- Check the page loads on mobile data, not on your home Wi-Fi.
- Check the signal at the location. Rural cemeteries frequently have none, and this changes what you should engrave. It is important enough that we wrote a whole guide about it.
If it scans badly, the fix is nearly always the mounting angle. A plaque on a vertical or slightly raked face beats one lying flat, which collects water, grit and sky-glare.
Step 7. Fit it
For urns, frames and benches you own, this is a job you can do yourself. Clean the surface with isopropyl alcohol, not household spray. Work above about five degrees and in the dry: cold, damp fitting is where nearly all adhesive failures come from, which makes a January installation a worse idea than a May one. Dry-fit with masking tape first and live with the position for a day.
For anything in a cemetery or churchyard, this is the mason's job, and in most council cemeteries it legally has to be.
Step 8. Tell people it exists
The step everybody skips, and the one that decides whether any of the previous seven mattered.
A plaque nobody knows about is scanned by nobody. Send the link to the family directly. Put it in the group chat. Give it to the friends who could not travel to the funeral, and to the ones abroad who will never see the grave.
Ask each of them for one memory. Ask a specific question, because "share a memory" paralyses people and "what is something he did that was completely typical of him?" gets answers.
If there is still a funeral or memorial service ahead, this is what memory cards are for. Twenty-five people leaving with the link is worth more than any amount of work you do alone.
Step 9. Keep your own copy
Every so often, download everything. Photographs as files, writing as a document, audio as audio, onto something you control.
Not because we expect to disappear, but because a memorial is measured in generations and no company is. The reasoning, and the four questions you should ask us and every competitor, are in how memorial QR codes work. A printed book does the same job on a shelf, and needs no company, no server and no electricity.
The order, in one line
Decide where, get permission, choose the finish, gather material, publish something small, test the code in place, fit it, tell everyone, keep a copy.
The only steps with any urgency are the second and the fourth: permission, because it gates everything, and gathering, because phones get wiped and people who remember things do not last forever. The rest will wait for you.