If you run a food blog, then you appreciate that the presentation of your recipes has a great impact in general branding of your blog or media company. While there are several recipe plugins for WordPress that can help you achieve great designs for your recipe cards, not all of them are created equal.
Thus, when choosing the right recipe plugin for WordPress, focus on one that prioritizes the following features:
- Great visual designs for recipe cards
- Variety of reusable templates
- Powerful search capability
- Systems for organizing and filtering recipes
- Nutritional info generation and display
- Ability to upload images and videos
- Optimization for search
- Schema setup for recipes and validation
- Ability for users to print recipes beautifully etc.
Depending on your needs and preferences, you may also want to look for recipe plugins that use the native block editor under the normal Posts post type without adding additional custom post types to your WordPress backend.
Recipe Plugins for WordPress
To help you make an informed decision on what plugin to use, I’m going to discuss several of these plugins individually, highlighting the main features and capabilities of each.
1: Recipe Card Blocks Plugin
As the name suggest, this recipe plugin is specifically built to utilize the new and now default Block editor for WordPress (Gutenberg). This means, with Recipe Card Blocks, you enjoy an overall intuitive system within the native WP editor.
The plugin enables you to:
- Add images and videos to your recipes.
- Display ingredients section
- Show directions with help of images
- Categorize your recipes depending on the difficulty of cooking, meal type and cuisine.
- Includes a tool for testing structured data right within the editor
- Ability to add ingredients and directions in bulk thus saving you time.
The plugin adds 5 extra blocks to your WordPress Editor (Recipe Card, Recipe Details, Ingredients, Directions and Nutrition Facts.) Thus, you have lots of freedom on how you can display your Recipes.
The plugin is also Google AMP-ready thus your recipes will be beautifully displayed on Google instant pages.
The Pro version of the plugin is even more powerful as it allows you to add star rating and comment reviews, gallery, etc. Readers can also adjust servings which automatically updates the ingredients quantity required to make the food for the said number of people.
You also get ability to set custom image and description for Pinterest, choose colour schemes, Food labels as well as add social sharing buttons such as Instagram, Pinterest and Facebook to your Recipe Cards
2: Create by Mediavine.
Mediavine, an Ad network has been empowering publishers with tools that help them make the most of their content. One of such tool is a WordPress plugin called Create. Now, this is not just another recipe plugin. It’s a powerful tool that helps you create really powerful content types such as lists, How-to guides and of course recipes.
If you want a really simple way of creating beautiful recipes faster, then Create is for you. The plugin makes use of a really intuitive and clean interface with guided steps on creating your recipes. All you need is to fill in the presented fields such as Title, instructions, ingredients etc.
Some of the outstanding features of this plugin include:
- Nutritional data auto-calculation
- Ability to import recipes and recipe data from other plugins such as WP Tasty Recipes and WP Recipe plugins
- 5 pre-defined recipe card designs to choose from
- Optimized for monetization using ads.
- SEO-optimized
- Super-lightweight
- One-click schema validation
The plugin, apart from its really great and user-friendly interface, has a great live preview feature that allows you to see how your recipe will look like as you continue to edit your recipe details on the left side of your recipe card editor.
3: Zip Recipes
Another great recipe plugin is the Recipe Plugin for Your Food Blog by Zip Recipes. It is a great intuitive tool that uses WYSIWYG editors. You can add recipes to posts, pages or any other custom post type.
The main features of this plugin include:
- Ability to set featured image
- Support for Schema and JSON LD to add micro data that allows Google to show rich snippets in search results such as ratings, cooking time and other labels
- AMP support to allow your recipes to load instantly from Google search results
- Pinterest advanced support. JSON-LD recipe markup makes recipes to appear on Pinterest as recipe pins, making them more discoverable for those looking for recipes.
- Rich snippets
- Beautiful print layout. Preview print version before printing
- Ability to monetize recipes with affiliate marketing tool
- Additional notes section
- Recipe name autocomplete tool based on the most popular versions of your recipe
- Designed to work with Google Search View
The Pro version of the plugin includes cool features such as automatic nutrition generation, serving adjustments, different recipe display themes, recipe search, recipe index, author settings and rating system.
4: Tasty Recipes
Tasty recipes is a popular recipe plugin for WordPress amongst many food bloggers. This is a paid plugin that doesn’t have a free version.
With Tasty Recipes you can:
- Import recipes from other plugins such as Ziplist, WP Ultimate Po, WP Recipe Maker, Yummly Rich Recipes, Meal Planner Pro, Cookbook etc.
- Choose from different presentation designs
- Insert ads to your recipes
- Convert normal posts into recipe cards either individually or in bulk
- Integrate videos from Mediavine, Vimeo, YouTube, Adthrive video shortcodes and other oEmbed providers
- Add step by step video tutorials with supported markups
- Preview your recipes right inside the WordPress editor
Unlike other recipe plugins, Tasty recipes plugin gives you freedom when it comes to formatting of your content. The editor uses rich-in text editor allows you to use formatting tools such as bullet points, strong text, italics, adding rich media as well as headings. Thus you are not locked into a block that is the same across all sites using the plugin.
The tool also allows you to integrate your site with a powerful Nutrifox tool that makes it easy to pull nutritional value data of your recipes. All you need is a Nutrifox ID. You can also choose to calculate nutrition details within the plugin instead.
5: Blossom Recipe Maker
Blossom Recipe Maker enables you to create awesome recipes in minutes, with stunning presentations. With this plugin, you can also add recipes to your existing posts or pages using shortcodes.
Notable features of Blossom Recipe Maker include:
- Ability to add photos to any step in your recipes
- Recipe gallery
- Video tutorials. You can add videos from Vimeo and YouTube to your recipes
- Single author templates. Readers can view recipes of particular authors as they wish
- Ability to set featured images for recipe taxonomies
- Users can search recipes by category, cooking method, tags or cuisine
- Translation ready
- Print-friendly versions. With just one click, readers can print recipes without images or video screenshots.
The recipes made using this plugin are super interactive, something that’s lacking in most other recipe plugins. For example, readers can check off or mark ingredients, steps or instructions as they prepare their food, and the progress status will start appearing
Conclusion:
While there are different recipe plugins for WordPress to choose from, you need one that gives you so much freedom when it comes to the display, formatting and presentation of your recipes. Your food blog deserves a unique branding approach that embodies your likes and values. This branding can only be achieved with the right recipe plugin.
