Food blogs and instructional cooking sites are some of the most popular websites on the net. Since there are so many websites dedicated to preparing food, it can be difficult for them to stand out from the crowd. Like the food itself, recipes need great presentation. This is where a WordPress recipe plugin is crucial.
Fortunately, there are lots of recipe plugins available to help you present your recipes in the best way possible. They even provide special features and improve your SEO. In this article, we’ll look at the best WordPress recipe plugins and help you decide which is best for your needs.
What is a WordPress Recipe Plugin and Why do You Need One?
WordPress recipe plugins add recipe cards to your posts and pages to display images, videos, ingredients, and instructions for making the food. They also include information about the food and recipe such as cooking time, number of servings, nutritional information, etc.
Recipes can be created by hand, but a plugin provides lots of advantages. For example, they improve your SEO for Google and Pinterest searches and pins using JSON-LD and schema.org structured data. They also provide other features such as printing, scaling the serving size, social sharing, styling, and lots more. Many include templates designed for publishing recipes.
There are many WordPress recipe plugins to choose from. Most have both a free and a premium version. We’ll look at both types.
1. WP Recipe Maker
WP Recipe Maker makes it easy to add recipes to any post or page. It uses JSON-LD metadata, which will improve your SEO for Google’s recipe search. It works with Gutenberg and the classic editor. Add photos and videos to any step of the recipe. Structure the ingredients into groups. Shortcodes include printing the recipe and jumping to the recipe. The print page is interactive and includes space for ads. The template editor lets you customize the design.
The pro version adds adjustable servings, ratings, ingredient links, nutritional labels, and more.
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Price: Free, the pro version starts at $49| More Information
2. Recipe Card Blocks
Recipe Card Blocks works with Gutenberg to create recipe cards. It adds several blocks including a recipe card with schema markup for SEO. Other blocks include details, ingredients, directions, and nutritional facts. Integrate video into your recipes. Add ingredients and instructions in bulk. It includes multiple designs, supports AMP, and it’s GDPR compliant.
The pro version adds galleries, start ratings, adjustable servings, ingredients quantity, a gallery, custom Pinterest image, comments rating, social CTA, and more.
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Price: Free, pro version starts at $69 per year | More Information
3. Cooked
Cooked comes with lots of premium features in the free version. Features include galleries, cooking timers, nutritional facts, printable recipes, a drag-and-drop recipe builder, SEO, etc. Display recipes in a grid. The servings switcher adjusts the ingredient amounts. Add prep and cooking times, difficulty levels, timers, and more. It also has powerful search and sorting features. The full-screen mode shows everything you need on the screen at once.
The pro version adds ratings, favorites, recipe submissions, user profiles, social sharing, additional taxonomies, and more.
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Price: Free, pro version starts at $39 | More Information
4. Recipe Maker For Your Food Blog
Recipe Maker For Your Food Blog includes a template editor so your recipes will have a professional design on any device. Create your templates with a WYSIWYG editor. Copy and paste from Microsoft Word or other sources. Add recipes to posts, pages, and custom post types. It can use the featured image from the post or page. Recipes include nutritional information, cook and prep time, notes, etc. It’s SEO optimized with JSON-LD metadata.
The pro version adds author settings, recipe card themes, visitor ratings, social media, recipe grid, automatic nutrition, serving adjustments, metric imperial converter, and search by ingredients.
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Price: Free, pro version starts at $39 | More Information
5. Create
Create works for any type of instructions including recipes, lists and roundups, and how-to guides. It automatically calculates nutritional data. Embed videos into your recipes. Multiple importers are included so if you’re using one of 11 different recipe plugins, you can import your content. It has multiple themes to choose from so it will fit your site’s design. It’s ad-ready so you can monetize your content.
Content is marked for mobile search carousels with Google Rich Snippet support with one-button schema validation. This plugin was designed to be fast and lightweight.
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6. Delicious Recipes
Delicious Recipes uses the REST API to manage recipes. This WordPress recipe plugin includes image and video galleries, nutritional charts, rich text instructions, printable recipes, advanced search, star ratings, adjustable servings, author profiles, social sharing, and more. Social features include Pinterest Rich Pin support and Pinterest and Instagram sharing. Create recipes in a custom WordPress dashboard.
Display recipes with Gutenberg and sidebar widgets. It adds 9 Gutenberg blocks, 6 widgets, and color and layout settings. It’s SEO optimized with Google Structured Data and it supports schema.
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7. Blossom Recipe Maker
Blossom Recipe Maker lets you add recipes to pages and posts with a shortcode. Add photos to any step, a gallery, YouTube and Vimeo videos, and group instructions with headings. Add and sort the ingredients and the instructions. Templates list by category, cuisine, cooking methods, and tags. Advanced searching includes the category, cuisine, cooking methods, and tags. Visitors can print the recipes without images. It’s translation ready.
Visitors can interact with the recipes. For example, they can adjust the serving size and mark the ingredients and instructions as they prepare the food. This allows them to adjust it to their needs and keep track of their progress.
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Price: Free | More Information
8. Tasty Recipes
Tasty Recipes is a premium WordPress recipe plugin that includes everything in one package. It was designed for food bloggers and includes nutritional information, embedded videos, and flexible formatting so you can create your recipes according to your writing style. Visitors can scale the recipes automatically to any size they want.
It’s style-able and includes 5 premade themes to get you started quickly. Convert recipes from other plugins. It uses JSON-LD for the best Google and Pinterest SEO.
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9. Cookbook
Cookbook is a premium plugin that was designed with food bloggers in mind. Recipes include nutritional data and ratings. Visitors can jump to the recipe at the bottom of the page with an embedded shortcode. Recipes are printable. Style the recipe with rich formatting. It was designed for the classic editor and is the sister plugin to WP Recipe Maker, which was designed for Gutenberg.
It includes JSON-LD recipe markup and schema to give you the best SEO for your recipes and makes them easy to share. You can override the schema output and create custom labels. It’s translation-ready and can import from other plugins.
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Price: $59.99 per year | More Information
Choosing a WordPress Recipe Plugin
Look for the extras you want in a recipe card. Consider if you need to import from another plugin. Determine if you need Gutenberg blocks or if you prefer to work with the classic editor with shortcodes.
Most of the WordPress recipe plugins have a free and a pro version. I recommend trying the free version to see if you like the interface and features, and then upgrade to the pro version to get the best features for your website if you need them.
WordPress Recipe Plugin Ending Thoughts
A food blog can be one of the most enjoyable and helpful blogs you can create. A WordPress recipe plugin can improve the design of your food blog, provide extra tools to attract and help your audience, and even make it easy for them to find you and share your content. Whatever your needs are, you’re sure to find the right plugin on this list.
We want to hear from you. Have you tried any of these 9 best WordPress recipe plugins? Let us know what you think about them.
Featured Image via VectorMine / shutterstock.com
This content was originally published here.