A memorial QR code is a scannable code, usually engraved on a small metal plaque, that opens a web page about someone who has died.
That is the whole idea. Everything else is detail.
If you have arrived here because you saw one on a headstone, or a funeral director mentioned them, or someone in the family suggested it and you are not sure what they mean, this page explains what they are without assuming you know anything about the technology.
What actually happens when you scan one
You open the camera on your phone. The ordinary camera, the one you take photographs with. You point it at the code, the way you would to photograph it. You do not need to press anything.
After a second, a notification appears at the top of the screen. You tap it. A page opens.
On that page is whatever the family chose to put there. Usually photographs. Often a few paragraphs about who the person was. Sometimes a recording of their voice, memories written by their friends, a family tree, or video from a wedding thirty years ago.
You do not download an app. You do not create an account or log in. You do not give anyone your email address. It takes about four seconds from lifting the phone to reading.
Why anybody wants one
Because a headstone has room for about twelve words.
Consider what a conventional memorial records. A name, two dates, and if there is space, a line like "much loved" or "at rest". That is the complete public record of eighty years of a person.
It says nothing about the fact that she taught four hundred children to read, or that he could fix anything with a hammer and a swear word, or that they met at a bus stop in 1961 in the rain. All of that is held in the memories of people who also, eventually, die.
Our view, and we should say plainly that it is only our view rather than a figure anybody has measured, is that ordinary family memory runs to about three generations. Test it on yourself: what can you say about your own great-grandparents that goes beyond a name and a date? For most people the answer is very little, and not because nobody cared. It is because nobody wrote it down while there was still someone who knew.
A memorial QR code is an attempt at that. The stone keeps the name and the dates, in the way it always has. The code holds everything that would not fit.
The two parts
It helps to see it as two separate things, because they are made by different processes and they fail in different ways.
The plaque. A physical object, usually a metal disc between 50mm and 80mm across, with the code marked into the surface. It is fixed to a headstone, a memorial bench, an urn, a picture frame or a tree marker. Ours come in brushed steel and brushed black.
The page. A website holding the photographs and words. It is hosted by whoever supplied the plaque, and it can be edited whenever the family wants, from a phone or a computer, for as long as it exists.
The plaque is simple and the page is where the differences between suppliers live. It is also where the risk lives, which is covered further down.
Where people put them
The headstone is the obvious answer and it is not the most common one, mostly because headstones carry the most rules.
- On an urn or casket at home. The simplest option by a distance. No permission needed from anyone. See the ashes and urns guide.
- On a memorial bench. Very common, and easily approved, because a plaque on a bench is already expected.
- On a headstone or lawn memorial. Needs permission from the burial authority, and usually a registered mason to fit it. See our guide to headstone rules.
- On the back of a framed photograph in the hallway. Unfashionable answer, and probably the one that gets scanned most.
- Printed on the order of service, so that everyone at the funeral can find the page afterwards. There is a how-to in making a QR code for an obituary or order of service.
- On a memorial tree, rose or garden marker.
There are twelve places families actually use, with the permission each one needs, in where to put a memorial QR code.
What it costs
In the UK, engraved metal plaques generally run between about £60 and £110. Our memorial plaque with memory page is £70, 80mm, and that price includes the page behind it, for as long as The Life Behind is trading, with no subscription and nothing further to pay.
The number that matters more is whether there is a recurring charge for keeping the page online. Many suppliers charge somewhere between £25 and £60 a year. Over the life of a memorial that dwarfs the price of the plaque, and a cheap plaque with an annual fee is usually the most expensive option available. There are worked figures in our cost guide.
Ask any supplier the question directly, in writing, before you buy: is there any recurring charge, and what happens to the page if it is not paid?
If you want to see how the UK suppliers actually compare on that question, we have put them side by side with dated prices in memorial QR code companies compared, and there is a fuller walkthrough of choosing one in the UK buyer's guide.
The reasonable objections
People raise four, and all four are fair.
"It looks modern on an old stone." It does. A 50mm disc low on the base is discreet; a large panel on the face of a Victorian headstone is not. Size and placement do most of the work here, and some churchyards will refuse it outright regardless.
"Will phones still read these in fifty years?" Probably, and for a better reason than most suppliers give. QR is a published international standard that no company owns and no company can withdraw. It is not a proprietary format that can be discontinued when a business fails.
"What if the company disappears?" The genuinely serious one. Most companies do not last fifty years and a memorial is measured in generations. The protection is not a promise from the supplier but an arrangement that does not depend on one: a code that can be repointed elsewhere, an export of your own files, no subscription that can lapse, and a printed copy. Our own answer, including what our terms of service commit us to if we ever stopped trading, is set out in how memorial QR codes work.
"Will it still scan after twenty winters?" If it is marked into metal rather than printed on top, yes. Printed and vinyl codes fade in British weather within a few years. The durability guide covers what survives and what does not.
Who they suit, and who they do not
They suit families who have a great deal they want to record and nowhere to put it. They suit scattered families, where relatives abroad can visit a page even if they can never visit a grave. They suit anyone who has looked at a headstone and felt that it said almost nothing about the person underneath it.
They do not suit everybody. If the idea of a phone at a graveside is distasteful to you, that is a coherent position and no amount of explanation should talk you out of it. If the family is unlikely ever to fill the page, the plaque becomes an empty gesture, and that is the most common way these go wrong. And if the memorial is in a strictly regulated churchyard, the answer may simply be no, for reasons set out in the churchyard regulations guide.
There is a fuller weighing of both sides, including a test that predicts whether you will regret it, in are memorial QR codes worth it.
How to start
If you decide it is for you, the order is: check permission first if it is going anywhere public, then choose the plaque, then fill the page. Not the other way around. There is a full walkthrough in how to set one up, step by step.
And on filling the page, one piece of advice worth more than the rest. Do not try to do it alone in the first weeks. Almost nobody has the energy for it, and a half-empty page is the usual outcome. Ask other people for one memory each: what comes back is nearly always things the family never knew. That is what memory cards are for, and if you cannot face any of it yet, we will build the page for you from whatever you send.
There is no deadline on it. The plaque will outlast everyone reading this.