Guests scan the card and join. No password read out loud.
The password on your router is sixteen random characters and somebody asks for it four times a day. A Wi-Fi code holds the network name, the security type and the password, so a guest points a camera at a printed card and joins. Nothing gets typed.
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A Wi-Fi code is one short line of text: the network name, the security type and the password, written in a format phones have read for years. There is no lookup and no server in the middle, so a printed card keeps working as long as the router settings stay the same. Point the iPhone Camera app at it on iOS 11 or later, or an Android 10 phone, and a prompt offers to join that network. One tap and you are on. Some older Android handsets show the raw line instead, the one starting with WIFI:S:, and the guest has to type the password by hand. Worth knowing before you order two hundred cards.
The pattern is the same everywhere it works: a network plenty of people need, and a password nobody should have to recite.
Three failures account for nearly all of them. The code printed too small, first of all: divide the reading distance by ten to get the minimum side, so a card read at 30 cm wants about 3 cm of code, and below 2 cm nothing reliable happens at arm's length. Then the quiet zone, the four modules of blank space around the pattern, trimmed off by a designer who cropped to the edge of the black. That blank border is part of the code. Third, light modules on a dark background, which looks better on a menu and fails on older readers, so keep it dark on light. A logo in the middle is fine if error correction stays at Q or H, and Q is already selected. Send the SVG or EPS to a printer rather than the PNG, and skim the printing notes before you commit to a run.
This is the question people ask second, right after they have made one. Anyone who can photograph the card has the password, exactly as anyone who can read it off a whiteboard does, and a phone camera across the room is enough. That is not an argument against printing it. A card on a café table or in a holiday rental is the ordinary use, and the password on it is meant to be handed out. It is an argument about which network goes into the code. Put the guest network in it and keep the till, the printers and the network drive on the main one, so a scanned card gets somebody to the internet and nowhere near your files. Change the password and every printed card becomes dead paper, so reprint the same day rather than the following week.
The network name is case sensitive. Hall_Guest and hall_guest are two different networks, and a phone will sit there hunting for one that does not exist, so copy the name off the router page instead of typing it from memory. For security, choose WPA/WPA2. A WPA3 router takes the same setting, because the code format only separates WEP, WPA and no encryption at all, and WEP belongs to hardware old enough to replace. For a network that does not broadcast its name, tick the hidden box under the password field. That writes an extra marker into the code telling the phone to look for a network it cannot see, and without it the phone searches and comes back with nothing. A hidden name buys very little security in practice, so the simpler route in a café or a rental is to leave the guest network visible.
The network name, the security type and the password live inside the pattern rather than on a web page, so a scanned card never calls back to this site and the code works with the internet down at both ends. There is no account, no expiry and no scan counter on a code like this.
iPhones have read these from the Camera app since iOS 11, and Android has joined networks straight from them since Android 10. Older Android handsets usually display the raw text line instead, and Google Lens covers most of the rest. Put one card out and test it on the oldest phone in the building.
Yes. Tick the hidden box when you make the code and the marker for a non-broadcast network goes into it, which is what lets the phone find a name it cannot see. Without that marker the phone searches and gives up. Hiding a network name adds almost nothing to its security, so leaving the guest network visible is usually the easier choice.
Every printed card stops working that moment, because the old password sits inside the pattern and cannot be edited afterwards. Generate a new code and swap the cards the same day. If you rotate the password on a schedule, put the reprint on the same reminder so the two never drift apart.
Choose WPA/WPA2 either way. The format only knows WEP, WPA and open, and a WPA3 router accepts the WPA setting from the code without complaint. WEP is the one to avoid: a router that offers nothing else is old enough that its security is broken and the hardware is due for replacement.
No. A Wi-Fi code carries its data inside the pattern, so there is nothing to count and no server to count it. Scan counting on this site exists only on the editable link code, which points at a redirect we host. A network password cannot be served that way.
