How to make a digital business card
Andrew Geerdts · 11 October 2026 · 4 min read
To make a digital business card, sign up with a card service, add your name, role, contact details and links, choose a design, and save. The service gives you a page address and a QR code. You share the card by showing the code, tapping an NFC tag written with the link, or sending the link itself.
What do you need before you start?
Less than you might think. Have your details to hand: the name you go by, your role, who you work for, the phone number and email address you want people to use, and the links you would want on a card. A photo helps, cropped so your face is clear at a small size. A logo if the card is for a business. That is all; you can start without any of it and fill it in later.
Where should a digital business card live?
There are three honest choices. You can use a card service, which gives you an address, a designer, a QR code and the saving-to-contacts part for nothing or very little. You can build a page yourself if you have a website and are comfortable editing it, though you will need to make your own vCard file and your own QR code. Or you can skip the page altogether and share a vCard file directly, which works but gives the other person a file to deal with rather than something to look at.
For most people the service is the right answer, because the parts that are fiddly to get right, the vCard, the code, the page that looks good on every phone, are the parts it does for you. With Umbel, for example, the card is a page at umbel.me/@yourhandle, the first card is free, and there is nothing to install on either side.
What details should you add?
Start with the things a person needs to remember you and reach you: name, role, company, one phone number, one email address. Then add the links that earn their place, which usually means your website or portfolio, one or two social profiles where you are actually active, and a booking link if you take meetings. Resist the urge to put everything on. A card that offers eleven ways to reach you is a card that offers none clearly.
If you want to go deeper on this, there is a separate page on what to put on a business card.
How do you choose a design?
Pick one that still looks like a card. Most services give you a handful of layouts, a set of colours and some typefaces; Umbel's designer has a set of designs, free choice of colours and sixteen fonts. Use your brand colours if you have them and a neutral palette if you do not. Choose one typeface for the whole card. Check it on a phone, not just on the screen you made it on, because that is where it will be seen.
How do you get your QR code and NFC tag working?
The QR code is made for you the moment the card exists, since it is only the card's address drawn as a pattern. Save it to your phone, put it on your lock screen, or print it on anything you like: a paper card, a sticker, the back of a laptop.
An NFC tag takes one more step. Buy a blank NFC tag or card, which is cheap, and write your card's address to it with any free NFC writing app on your phone. From then on, holding a phone near the tag opens the card. Umbel does not sell tags; any tag that holds a web address will do.
How do you add a digital business card to Apple Wallet or Google Wallet?
If your service offers wallet passes, add the pass from the card's own page. It appears in Apple Wallet or Google Wallet with your QR code on it, and you can bring it up from the lock screen without opening anything. The pass carries the code; the card behind it stays live, so changing the card does not mean re-adding the pass.
How do you keep it up to date?
This is the easy part, and the reason to do any of it. When something changes, edit the card. Everyone who has the address sees the new version. Make a habit of opening your own card once a quarter and reading it as a stranger would; stale links and old job titles are the commonest faults, and both take a minute to fix.