QR code menu for restaurants: setting one up right

Most guides for this start with the generator. That’s the ten second part. The decision that costs you money later is what the code opens, and almost nobody makes it on purpose.

How to set up a QR code menu for your restaurant

1. Decide what the code opens before you make it. A code is a printed address and nothing else. So the real question is which address you want frozen onto two hundred table tents.

2. Put the menu on a page on your own website. A page you control can be edited in a minute, and it keeps working when everything around it changes. Most places skip this step, and skipping it is what makes all the later ones harder. If you don’t have a website yet, this is the thing that finally justifies one, and a single page is enough to start. A menu written as text is also something a search engine can read, which a photograph of a menu board is not.

3. Give that page an address you won’t want to change. Something plain, like yourplace.com/menu. A year later a redesign can rename every page, and the printed code then opens a missing one. Pick the address now and tell whoever rebuilds the site that it stays. The reward shows up later. A flyer from last season, or a decal still stuck to the window, keeps working because nothing behind it moved.

4. Don’t point it at a PDF. A PDF is a file, so changing one price means replacing the whole file. Anyone whose phone kept a copy of the old one keeps seeing the old one. Google can read a PDF, but a guest at a table still gets a document rather than a page.

5. Don’t point it at a cloud drive either. A Drive or Dropbox link works right up until the file is moved, renamed, or has a sharing setting changed. After that, the code on the table opens a sign-in screen.

6. Use a code you can repoint. A plain code has the address baked into the pattern, so a new address means a new pattern and a new print run. The difference between the two kinds is worth five minutes before anything goes to the printer.

7. Choose one code, or one per table. One code for the whole room is simpler, and it’s what most places actually want. One per table only earns its keep if you plan to read the scan counts by section.

8. Print the address in words under the square. One short line of text rescues anyone whose camera won’t cooperate. It also tells a guest where they’re about to land, which gets more scans than a bare square does.

9. Test it on a phone that isn’t yours. Use cellular rather than your own wifi, at the table, in the light that table has at dinner. Most of the ways a code fails turn up in that one test.

The menu Google may already be showing

This is the part that surprises people. Google can find a menu for your restaurant in more than one place. Whatever it found may be on your profile already, without you putting it there.

You get to pick which one shows. Open Edit menu in your Business Profile and choose your source under the Full menu tab. Google’s own wording is that your preferred menu appears as public info on your profile.

Set the menu link itself while you’re in there. It sits under Edit profile, then Business information, then Contact, then Menu link. Use the same address your printed code opens.

That’s the quiet argument for hosting the menu yourself. One page and one address, with the table tent and the search result both pointing at it.

What people hit next

The page is slow. A menu saved as one big photograph is a heavy file on cellular, and it can’t be read without pinching. Real text loads instantly and resizes itself to the phone.

Nobody can read it. A photo of a printed menu is one fixed picture, so a guest pans around hunting for the pasta. Text fits itself to whatever screen it lands on, and it also lets somebody using a screen reader hear the menu.

The scan count looks low. It usually is, and that’s normal. A table of four scans once, not four times. What a scan count can and can’t tell you is a short read.

Somebody asks for a paper menu. Plenty of guests prefer one and a few genuinely need one. A short stack behind the host stand costs almost nothing, and it saves the table that can’t use a phone.

The menu changed and the code is wrong. Follow step two and you edit the page and you’re done. Skip it, and this is the week step two starts to make sense.

Where ours fits

QRFLOW makes the square and keeps the address behind it editable. A code printed in spring can point somewhere else by summer, with no reprint. Static codes are free and need no account, and a code becomes changeable on the paid plan.

It doesn’t build your menu page, and it shouldn’t. That belongs on your own site for the reasons above, and whatever tool already runs your website will do it.