Which link to put in, and how never to reprint
By Tiehl Roberto Matías · 7 min read · Updated 26 October 2026
Of everything decided before printing, what changes the result most is not the size of the piece or the filament: it is how many characters the link has. A link with tracking and a short one that go to the same place can give modules 40 % apart, and that decides whether the piece reads at all.
In this guide
What each character costs
A QR code grows in jumps. When the content no longer fits in one version, it goes up to the next, and each version adds four modules a side. Since the piece still measures the same, those extra modules have to come from somewhere: each one gets smaller.
This table is calculated with this site's encoder, for a 90 mm piece at correction H with the four-module quiet zone. All five links go to the same place.
With your real link you can see it in the calculator (in Spanish), which also tells you how many characters you have left before the next version jump and how many you would have to remove to drop one.
On a 90 mm piece there is room to spare and a long link is merely ugly. Where this stops being cosmetic and starts deciding whether the piece can exist is on the small ones: on a 35 mm collar tag (in Spanish), the difference between 26 characters and 43 is the difference between reading and not.
| How you write the link | Characters | Version | Module |
|---|---|---|---|
| With tracking parameters | 88 | 9 | 1.48 mm |
| Ordinary link to the page | 58 | 6 | 1.84 mm |
No www, no extension | 34 | 4 | 2.20 mm |
| Public shortener | 22 | 3 | 2.43 mm |
| Your own short redirect | 19 | 3 | 2.43 mm |
From the first to the last there is 64 % more module size without touching the piece. And that difference is exactly what decides whether it works with a 0.8 mm nozzle, which needs modules of 1.6 mm minimum: the long link falls short and the short one has room to spare.
That is why tracking parameters are so expensive. A
?utm_source=table&utm_medium=qr&utm_campaign=menu is thirty-odd characters
nobody sees that cost you three versions of code. If you want to count scans, do it on the
server side with your own redirect, as explained below: you measure just the same and the code
knows nothing about it.
What can be trimmed for free
Before resorting to anything clever, there are four free trims:
- Drop the
www.Nearly every domain works with and without it. That is four characters. - Drop the trailing slash if the link already points at a specific page.
- Drop the tracking parameters, as above.
- Use a short path. If you get to choose the page's address, make it
/menuand not/documents/autumn-2026-seasonal-menu.pdf.
What you must not drop is the https://. Without it many readers
open the address as a search rather than as a page, and the customer ends up in Google instead of
in your menu.
The trouble with public shorteners
A standard shortener leaves the link very short and the code enormous. On a screen there is no objection at all. On a printed piece that will sit on a wall for years, there is.
The reason is simple: the destination of that link is not yours. It depends on a company that can close, change owner, start charging for what used to be free, or delete links that have gone unused for a long time. When that happens, your pieces turn into bits of plastic pointing at an error page.
There is a quieter problem too: some widely used shorteners appear on spam lists. A browser or a phone antivirus may show a suspicious-site warning before letting the customer through. On a stranger's screen, that warning kills the visit.
For a quick test, a shortener is fine. For a batch you are going to hand out, no.
Your own redirect
The answer that solves both things at once — a short link and control of the destination — is to use an address of your own that redirects wherever you want.
It works like this: in the code you print https://myrest.co/m. That address has no
content; all it does is send the visitor to the current menu. The day you change menu, change
platform, or want to point at a different promotion, you change the destination of the
redirect and the pieces already printed keep working.
The three advantages, in order of importance:
- You depend on nobody. The domain is yours and you renew it.
- The destination can be changed forever. A printed piece stops being a permanent decision.
- You can count the scans by looking at visits to that address, without putting a single parameter in the code.
Setting one up without being a programmer
You do not need to know how to program or to have a server. There are three routes, from simplest to most flexible:
If you already have a website. Nearly every hosting panel has a redirects
section where you give a source address and a destination. You create /m pointing at
your menu and that is it. If your site runs on a content manager, there is almost certainly a
redirect setting built in or a plugin that does it.
If you have no website but you have a domain. The registrar you bought it from
usually offers domain redirection at no cost: you point the whole domain, or a subdomain like
menu.yourdomain.com, at the destination address.
If you have neither. Registering a short one costs little a year and is what makes the address short. A five or six letter domain with a one-character path leaves the link under twenty characters, which is the best case in the table above.
One detail that matters: use a permanent redirect if the destination is not going to change for a long time, and a temporary one if you intend to keep changing it. The practical difference is that browsers remember the permanent kind, so if you change the destination later some visitors may still be sent to the old one. For a QR you want to be able to redirect in the future, temporary.
The rule in three lines
- The shorter it is, the bigger the module. It is the cheapest lever you have; it does not cost a gram of filament.
- Never put the final link directly on a piece you are going to hand out. Put an address of your own that redirects.
- Check the link as a PNG before printing. Scan it with a phone that is not yours and see where it actually lands.
If in the end there is no way to shorten the link, the other way out is to make the piece bigger. The exact sum for how much bigger is in the minimum size guide. Unless the piece cannot grow: on a business card (in Spanish) the size is set by a pocket, and then shortening the link stops being an improvement and becomes the only lever left.
Watch it change as you type
The generator tells you the size of each module while you type. Paste your long link, look at the figure, paste the short one and compare: the difference shows immediately.
Open the generatorKeep reading
- Engraved or raised: which one reads betterA single-colour code reads by shadow, and the phone's torch erases the shadow. When it works and when it does not.
- How to test the code before printing the batchFour tests in order, and the specific failure each one catches. The batch gets printed last, not first.