Yes. You can do the whole thing yourself for under £20, and for a lot of families that is the right answer.
We sell the paid version, so read this accordingly. But we would rather set out the free route honestly than have somebody spend £70 on something they did not need. Here is how to do it, followed by the four places it goes wrong, so you can weigh both.
How to do it yourself
Step 1. Make the page
The code is only a signpost. You need somewhere for it to point.
Free options that work: a charity-run memorial page such as MuchLoved, a shared photo album with a public link, a free blog or website page, or a memorialised social media account. Any of these is a real destination.
Build it before you make the code. A code pointing at nothing is the most common DIY mistake, and it usually happens because the plaque arrives first and there is a rush to use it. What to put on the page is in building a digital memorial page.
Step 2. Generate the code
Any free QR generator will do this in about thirty seconds. Two settings matter and both are usually buried.
Choose the highest error correction available, usually shown as level Q or H. This decides how much dirt, scratching and lichen the code survives before it stops scanning. At level H roughly thirty per cent of the surface can be obscured and it still reads. At level L the first serious blemish kills it. The two look almost identical to you and behave completely differently after five winters.
Export as a vector file if the tool offers it, meaning SVG, EPS or PDF. A small PNG blown up to fit a plaque prints blurred and often will not scan.
Keep it black on white. Not tinted, not on a photograph, and with a clear white margin all round it, roughly four modules wide. Crowding a code against a border is the commonest reason a home-made one fails.
Step 3. Get it onto something
This is where the money goes, and it is not much.
- A blank engraved metal tag, £4 to £15 from a marketplace maker or a local trophy and engraving shop. Send them the vector file. This is the right option for anything outdoors.
- A local engraver will often do a one-off small plaque for £15 to £40 and will know what they are doing with the file.
- Printed on the order of service or memory cards, which costs nothing extra on printing you are already buying. There is a full how-to in making a QR code for an obituary or order of service.
- A sticker or printed label is fine indoors on a frame or a memory box. It is not fine outdoors, for reasons below.
Step 4. Test it where it is going
Four minutes, and almost nobody does it. Scan it on two phones, one iPhone and one Android, ideally including an older handset. Scan it at the distance a visitor would stand, in the actual light. Check the page loads on mobile data rather than home Wi-Fi. And check there is signal at the location at all, because a great many rural churchyards have none.
Where DIY quietly fails
None of these bite on day one. All of them bite later, which is the problem with a memorial.
1. Printed codes fade
Ultraviolet light breaks down ink, and it does not need sunshine. Black drifts to grey, contrast disappears, and the code becomes unreadable to a camera while still looking perfectly present to you. Printed and vinyl codes outdoors typically lose usable contrast within two to five years.
The fix is free advice: get it engraved into metal rather than printed on top. If you do nothing else from this article, do that. The full ranking of materials is in do QR memorial plaques survive British weather.
2. The address is burned in permanently
The serious one, and the one nobody thinks about.
A code generated by a free tool is almost always static, meaning the destination web address is physically part of the pattern. It can never be changed. If that address ever moves, or the free service closes, or the page structure changes, the plaque becomes a decorative square and the only remedy is a new plaque.
A dynamic code points at a short forwarding address that can be aimed elsewhere at any time. Free generators do offer these, and here is the catch: the redirect is very often free for a trial and then requires a paid subscription. When that lapses, every code you printed or engraved stops working at once.
So the honest position is that DIY gives you a choice between a code that can never change and a redirect that depends on a subscription somebody has to keep paying. Neither is ideal, and the reasoning is in how memorial QR codes work.
3. Free hosting has an owner
Whatever holds the page belongs to somebody. Free photo albums get reorganised, free sites are discontinued, and accounts lapse when the person who set them up stops logging in, or dies.
The specific failure worth planning for: one person builds it, only that person can edit it, and the login is written nowhere. When they go, the memorial freezes, and in time nobody can prove it belongs to the family at all.
4. There is nobody to ask
In nine years, when a code will not scan and nobody remembers which service the page was on, there is no support address. That is not a small thing when the person who set it all up is the one who has since died.
What it costs, both ways
| Doing it yourself | Buying it done | |
|---|---|---|
| Cost | £5 to £40 | £70 to £110 |
| Code type | Static, or a redirect that may expire | Dynamic, repointable |
| Hosting | Someone else's, indefinitely | The supplier's, on whatever terms they publish |
| If it breaks | Your problem | Replaced |
| Time | An afternoon, plus the engraver | Ten minutes |
When DIY is clearly right
- Anything indoors: a frame, a memory box, a shelf. None of the weather arguments apply.
- Funeral stationery. A printed code on an order of service is temporary by nature and costs nothing.
- A temporary marker while a headstone is being made.
- Trying the idea before committing. Genuinely sensible, and we recommend it in are memorial QR codes worth it.
- You are comfortable with the technology and will keep an eye on it. If you can read this article without glazing over, you can maintain a DIY memorial.
- The budget is tight. A memorial that exists beats a better one you did not buy.
When it is worth paying somebody
- It is going outdoors, permanently, on a memorial meant to outlast you.
- The person who would maintain it is not confident with technology, or will not be around in twenty years.
- You want a burial authority to approve it, which often means supplying written dimensions and material specifications. See the UK headstone rules.
- You are a funeral director putting your name to a recommendation, where the complaint lands at your door in five years. That is covered separately in memorial QR codes for funeral directors.
- The page will hold the only copy of recordings and photographs that exist nowhere else.
The advice that applies either way
Engrave the name and dates alongside the code. A bare code is anonymous, means nothing to a passer-by, and means nothing at all to somebody with no phone or no signal. A name beside it makes the plaque work regardless. This is the single best thing you can do to a memorial plaque and it applies to a £5 DIY tag exactly as much as to ours.
Keep your own copy of everything. Photographs as files, writing as a document, audio as audio, on a drive you control, refreshed once a year. This protects you from every supplier including us, and from your own free hosting choices.
Write down where it all is. Which service, which login, and who else can get in. Put it with the will. A memorial nobody can access is a memorial that stops.
If you decide you would rather not run it yourself, ours is the memorial plaque with memory page at £70. That is one payment, with no subscription and nothing further to pay, and the page is included for as long as The Life Behind is trading. We cannot promise to trade forever and nor can anyone else, so our terms of service say what happens if we stopped: every family gets at least 90 days' notice by email and a full download of everything on the page before it goes offline. You can also download the lot at any time, as ordinary photograph and video files, without asking us. And if you would rather compare everyone first, that is in memorial QR code companies compared.