So, you have a food blog and probably think that any WordPress website can help you publish recipes?
But how about using a purpose-built WordPress plugin for recipes, as it can ensure your recipes are beautifully formatted, easy to read and even are printable.
By installing one of the following WordPress recipe plugins in this WordPress Wednesday collection, you can add lots of useful features to your site for publishing this type of content.
One of the reasons why you should add a recipe plugin is that you get access to templates that were created specifically for publishing recipes, a search tool that enables your visitors to search for a particular recipe, plus a system for organising and filtering your recipes so that your audience can find what they’re looking for.
Many of the recipe plugins for WordPress also can ensure your recipe content been optimised for search engines. It not only increases the chances of your site and your content being notice but it also tells them that your site has recipes included rather than just posts and pages. This should help your content show up when people are searching specifically for recipes.
Other useful features you might want to look out for is the ability to display nutritional information, add cooking times, and upload videos to your recipes. So let’s start by looking at the first of five food recipe plugins for WordPress
1. WP Recipe Maker
WP Recipe Maker is a free plugin for publishing beautifully presented recipes, and currently, this plugin has been used on over 20,000 sites. The WP Recipe Maker plugin simplifies the process of adding recipes and has been built with SEO in mind, and your recipes will be optimised to increase its chances of being found by search engines.
With this plugin, your content will show up in the Google recipe search engine as well as the regular search mode and addition to the friendly design of this plugin, and you can use the social media integration to reach to more people. Visitors can also leave ratings for your recipes, which can help your content stand out. While adding images and videos to your recipe pages is very straight-forward. As well as all the other features you find in the free version of WP Recipe Maker, and there’s also a premium version of this plugin is available if you need even more functionality.
Lastly, this plugin is also compatible with the classic WordPress editor and Guttenberg editor.
Price: Free
2. Cooked
Cooked is a feature-rich recipe plugin that improves the capabilities of your WordPress site when it comes to publishing recipes.
Cooked comes with a simplified interface that makes it easy to enter the details of your recipes, and combined with a stylish template for presenting those recipes when they’re published on your website, its thanks to the drag and drop interface that you get a right amount of control over how your recipes are presented.
Cooked has pre-built templates are well designed, so there’s no need to take a hands-on approach to the design of your recipes unless you want to. As well as the individual recipe template, there’s also a grid layout that’s used to display the list of recipes on your site. Included in this plugin are the featured image, title and description or each recipe.
Also, you have the option of adding an archive page to your website that displays all the recipes in one easily accessible location. Along with this plugin, it has a search tool that gives your visitors the ability to search through all of your recipe.
Some of the other distinguishing features of the plugin include the ability to add nutritional information to your recipes, the option of setting a difficulty level for a recipe, and author tags for the recipes that allow visitors to filter the recipes according to who uploaded them.
Price: Free
3. Zip Recipes
Zip Recipes is the third free plugin that gets your recipes published and organised on your site.
Like some of the other recipe WordPress plugins, Zip Recipes has been built to work with the Google Search View to help your content show up in this search engine. Not only will your recipes be search engine optimised with this plugin, but they will also look great when published on your site.
Each recipe includes details about the servings, a description, a list of the ingredients, and photos to help illustrate your content. Included in this plugin is a handy print button to each recipe that allows your visitors to quickly print off a copy that’s well-formatted and easy to read.
Thanks to the user interface, your recipes are well organised and kept separate from the other content on your site. However, the recipes are added using the default WordPress editor along with a few extra fields, preventing you from having to learn a new system for inputting the recipe content.
There’s a premium version of this plugin, the free version of Zip Recipes certainly isn’t lacking in features. Some reasons to choose this plugin includes the ability to monetise your recipes by using the affiliate link tool, full Google AMP support, and a recipe name auto-complete tool which helps you find the most popular and most searched for versions of your recipe’s name.
Price: Free
4. WP Ultimate Recipe
WP Ultimate Recipe been described as an advanced free recipe plugin that been packed with features.
Therefore, if you’re not worried about having access to a very simplified workflow, then WP Ultimate Recipe and its various functionality could be the best choice for you and your site.
That’s not to say that WP Ultimate Recipe isn’t user-friendly. It’s just that the extra features give you more to think about each time you add a new recipe to your website or food blog.
Some features you will get access to if you do install the WP Ultimate Recipe plugin includes the ability to add your own custom serving sizes to the recipes, a print-ready format that makes it easy for your visitors, and easy social sharing of recipes on sites like Facebook and Pinterest. You can also use the dynamic shortcodes to insert any of your recipes into your posts and pages in your WordPress site within just a few clicks. Also included in the plugin are its own set of taxonomies that allow you to use custom tags to organize your recipes.
Furthermore, as you’d expect from a WordPress recipe plugin, is you can easily add images and videos to your recipes. These elements can be added at any stage of the recipe to make it clear to your visitors what they need to do and what the meal should be looking like at that point. Other useful features includes a text search tool that makes it easy for your visitors to search the recipe, full support for Google AMP, and integration with other recipe tools and services.
Price: Free
5. Tasty Recipes
Tasty Recipes has features to help you upgrade the recipe publishing functionality of your WordPress site.
If you choose to purchase this premium plugin, you will be able to import your recipes from various range of platforms including Ziplist, Meal Planner Pro and Cookbook as well as other free WordPress recipe plugins some of them are on this list.
Therefore, if you’ve been using a different WordPress recipe plugin upgrading to Tasty Recipes doesn’t mean starting from scratch. As part of the migration process, you can choose to convert your recipes one at a time or just do them all at once.
As well as being able to transition to this recipe plugin smoothly, you can also enjoy new features including the ability to choose from a range of recipe card presentation styles and insert adverts right into your recipe content to enable you to monetize your website.
Additional reasons to use this plugin include support for search engines, integrations with social media marketing and a user-friendly interface for adding the recipes to your website. Also take a more hands-on approach on designing of your recipes, thanks to the styling functionality of Tasty Recipes and like many other recipe plugins Users can leave star ratings for your recipes.
Price: $79.00
