Can the plant tag QR code link to another website other than Plants Map?

Our tags and signs are created with an automated process that makes a QR code that links to your plant pages on Plantsmap.com only.

We do not print Plants Map tags or signs that go to other websites as there is a high likelihood that the hyperlinks will break at some point in the future resulting in a poor experience.

We have built a system where we are very careful that those links are static and the links never change so the codes continue to work through our various site updates.

How to add hyperlinks or reference links to your Plants Map pages:

Scanning a Plants Map tag opens a page on plantsmap.com and on that page, you can include one or more links to any other website where visitors can get even more information about that particular plant.

There are two ways to do this.

One way is by using what we call “Reference Links” where you can add one or more links in the Plant Details section to sites you like with more information about that plant. This can be found under the Plant Details tab > Owner Information > Reference Links.
The other way is to use the hyperlink tool in the “story” or description area on the top of the plant page. When you are writing about the particular plant, you can highlight some of the text and link it to another site.

We do not encourage you to rely on hyperlinks for your story

We encourage you to reference as many sites as you like but also include information in your plant story.

Pages that only put in a hyperlink will not rank high enough as informative to be seen in our Plant Finder tool.
There is a high likelihood that the hyperlinks will break resulting in a poor experience for your visitor scanning your tags.

We do not print tags or signs that go to other websites or other items of interest.

Why do hyperlinks or reference links break?

Hyperlinks or the reference links you enter may fail due to various reasons but what frequently happens is one of two things: the site is using a “Single Page App” to delivers results or at some point development updates to a website change the taxonomy structure of a URL and it ‘breaks.’

Some popular database sites rely on what is known as a “Single Page App” that delivers search results. The pages change, but the URL is constant to only their main search page. You may be looking at a plant page, but the URL is the main search URL because that content was rendered in the browser and not on the server which would change the URL.

On some plants, if you land on the page from Google, you may go to directly to the page and get a unique URL but after navigating the site and using the search tool, you get into the single page app part of the site and that URL doesn’t change and would be the same for many plants.

The other frequent scenario is when a web developer decides to redesign a website and makes what appears to be insignificant changes that actually result in breaking every link that website owner has worked hard to establish….including links to social media and QR codes.

That is why Plants Map QR Codes only link to a permanent plant page URL on Plants Map. We won’t break your QR code link through updates or other changes to our site.