As not only a dedicated web developer but also an enthusiastic home cook (albeit with varying levels of success), I probably know the importance of having a seamless user experience on your recipe site as well as anyone. In fact, I don’t know if I can think of a more frustrating experience than searching for a recipe online.
Actually, maybe I can. We’ve all experienced scrolling for eternity through someone’s life story, a tedious description of each ingredient, and a thesis about baking versus air-frying before you finally encounter the recipe. What can make it even worse is when you’re also blitzed with a half-dozen ugly ads that make it impossible to read, save, or print your recipe.
This is why I can’t wait to share my go-to solution for any post that includes recipes: my very favorite WordPress recipe plugin.
What Is the Best Recipe Plugin?
Let’s do the opposite of what all those recipe posts I mentioned have done and get right to the point.
After hours upon hours of testing, research, and web design here at Eminent SEO, WP Tasty absolutely smashes the competition as my favorite recipe plugin for WordPress. The best pieces of WP Tasty are in the details of my WP Tasty plugin review.
The WP Tasty plugin bundle is made up of four powerful plugins, with the shining star being WP Tasty Recipes. Using this plugin, bloggers can publish stunningly organized recipes that are optimized for SEO.
As a leader of the web design and developer team here at Eminent SEO, I’ve thoroughly tested all the serious recipe plugin contenders, but this one is by far the best. After working with a variety of clients across all industries, it’s easy to see that WP Tasty is the best option.
Put plainly, you can expect the following when using WP Tasty Recipes:
- Intuitive Design – An easy-to-use interface facilitates adding and managing your recipes.
- SEO Optimization – The powerful tool can format your recipes to boost visibility in search engines, bringing in larger amounts of traffic.
- Tailored for You – WP Tasty Recipes empowers you to customize the design and display of your recipes so that it flows smoothly with your sites’ aesthetics.
- Offline Options – Users can print recipes easily, giving them an overall more straightforward and enjoyable experience. After printing out one or more recipes and using them offline, they are likely to come back for more.
- Ease of Use – The plugin is super easy to use, even for bloggers who are just getting started and have no web design expertise. Plus, it’s more than just user-friendly; the plugin also comes with a ton of features that can help you boost traffic, monetize your blog, and tailor your site to reflect your brand and messaging.
Here’s why all of that matters.
Why a Good Recipe Plugin for WordPress Sites Is Crucial
Many of my fellow cooks and developers ask me, “Jenny, what’s the point of having a recipe plugin for your WordPress site? Can’t I just type out my text and be done?” Au contraire. Using a recipe plugin can not only drive productivity and enhance your site, but it’s also a crucial facet of any blog that will ever post recipes.
Let’s dive into the many benefits of the right plugin.
Enhanced User Experience
Having a recipe plugin that is simpatico with your site is crucial to facilitate the user-friendliness of your WordPress site and boost the user experience. A good plugin should allow you to clearly organize your recipes and seamlessly put them into a format that is clear and easy to read. Plugins also offer offline features like downloading and printing recipes that keep users coming back for more when they get back online.
Improving SEO
If you haven’t heard of SEO by now, you are likely a newcomer to the blogging game or don’t care much about expanding your influence or monetizing. Basically, bloggers leverage search engine optimization (SEO) techniques to pull more users to their sites. Using a stellar recipe plugin can enhance your SEO strategy, driving more traffic to your recipe blog and ultimately helping you reach wider audiences. Here’s how.
An advanced recipe plugin leverages structured data to increase the visibility of your recipes to search engines. The more the search engines can read and process, the more likely your recipe is to rank in search results. A quality plugin can also pull from your inventory to ensure that ratings, cook times, and images can be optimally displayed in search engines for eager audiences.
Facilitating Content Management
My favorite recipe plugin has saved a lot of time and tears. That’s because a quality plugin makes it easier to manage blogs that contain recipes, especially when you’re doing things in volume. In other words, I don’t have to languish in the nitty-gritty of adding, editing and organizing recipes for each page, because the plugin does most of the work for me.
By avoiding manual content sorting, I can focus on creating quality recipes and engaging content instead. Features such as content categorization and tagging also help me improve site navigation without headaches.
Increasing Engagement and Monetization
Plugins feature digital tools such as comments and star ratings to encourage users to interact with the site, leading to increased traffic and online participation. By leaving affiliate links and ads throughout your site, you can monetize your traffic and make more money doing what you love. By using an advanced plug, you increase audience engagement and potential for bringing in more revenue.
Ensuring Mobile-Friendly Design
Many users looking for recipes are doing so on their mobile devices, especially phones and tablets. That’s why it’s so critical to offer a WordPress site that is responsive and adaptive to these interfaces. Using a top-notch recipe plugin means you can ensure your recipes are beautifully displayed and can be downloaded with ease on all devices. User-friendly mobile design can help you make sure your recipes shine no matter how people are viewing them.
Building Trust and Credibility
Let’s face facts: users won’t trust a blog that looks like it has been quickly thrown together to help them make food for their families. They especially won’t trust a site that has no order or cohesion to supply the correct measurements necessary for great food. By leveraging a credible recipe plugin, you can ensure that your branding is consistent while building trust and credibility. A good recipe plugin should visually wow users with appealing design and organization.
Creating a user-friendly platform not only sets you apart from your competition, but it keeps users coming back time and time again.
Why WP Tasty Is The Shining Star
Other WordPress plugins may try to imitate WP Tasty, but none have quite reached the same level for me. Here’s why I recommend this plugin to anyone who will listen, starting with my top two favorite qualities and ending with a list of the best benefits.
User-Friendliness
When I was contemplating creating my first recipe post, I was a little overwhelmed and unsure about where to start. I had a bit of imposter syndrome, even as a web developer, as I was new to posting recipes – I was no Martha Stewart, after all. Facing technological hurdles probably would have contributed to my insecurity.
WP Tasty took the confusion out of starting and growing a blog by easily facilitating adding, editing and managing recipes. The straightforward design of WP Tasty makes changes seem intuitive, and adding to your recipe blog is so easy, you’ll be stacking up the recipes in no time. Whether you are just getting started or you’re a well-seasoned blogger or developer, you’ll find that the plugin’s user-friendly design can save you loads of time.
SEO Optimization
SEO is crucial for food bloggers and other bloggers to bring new and old audiences to their websites. WP Tasty is one of the most SEO-friendly recipe plugins for WordPress, reading and formatting your recipes in a way that is extremely “understandable” or visible to search engines. If a user searches for a recipe like yours, your recipe will be more likely to show up with the use of this plug. The plugin uses structured data (Schema.org) to mark your recipes and make them more attractive to search engines.
My Favorite Features of WP Tasty Recipes
For me, WP Tasty Recipes clearly stands out among other recipe plugins and the rest of the WP Tasty plugin bundle. Not only does this powerful plugin facilitate the creation and design of good-looking recipes on your site, but it also leverages SEO techniques to boost your chances of being seen in search engines. Users who are more accustomed to offline cooking and prefer to download or print your recipes will have a good time traversing your site and coming back for more.
Using WP Tasty, you can enjoy the following:
- Elegantly designed recipe cards. Encounter multiple recipe card designs to pick out a template that matches your branding and overall aesthetic.
- Instruction and ingredient links. You can put links that are connected to certain instructions or ingredients, helping your readers easily find additional information or purchase certain products.
- Integration of recipe videos. As recipe videos are on the rise in popularity, it’s critical to work with a plugin that boosts your ability to traverse different mediums. With this innovative plugin, you can add videos to guide your reading more easily and visually.
- Interaction through ratings. With the star ratings capability, readers can easily rate your recipes. Recipe ratings increase the trustworthiness of a website and increase interactions which ultimately drive better search engine rankings.
My Favorite WP Tasty Plugin Benefits
I’m not sure if I can fit all the best benefits of the WP Tasty plugin into a short list (there are just TOO many) – but I’ll touch on my favorites.
- Clean, organized pages. This plugin helps organize and categorize recipes into sleek cards that are easy to find and blend with your web aesthetic. And isn’t easy-to-read and easy-to-find exactly what we’re going for?
- More readers. Optimizing SEO on your site means you can boost your search engine ranking and bring new audiences in to try out your recipes. They’ll get hooked on your style of cooking and talking about how you cook – and you’ll get hooked on the influx of readers.
- Monetization options. While not worrying about money would be ideal, we need it to survive so we can continue to do the things we love… Like creating culinary excellence. This plugin can bring in more traffic and engagement, making it simpler and smoother to monetize your blog.
- Your own look. Sophisticated customization options allow you to flexibly implement and update the look and feel of your recipes, facilitating consistency of design aesthetics and enforcing brand credibility.
Whether you’re someone who is serious about running a recipe blog on WordPress, or a multifaceted web designer who will occasionally post recipes, WP Tasty is a must-have. Its user-friendliness, paired with robust features, makes it a great choice for beginners and experienced bloggers alike.
WP Tasty Roundup
In addition to WP Tasty Recipes, the WP Tasty plugin bundle has three other robust tools:
- WP Tasty Pins – Design your images for Pinterest, which continues to be a crucial driver of traffic for many food bloggers.
- WP Tasty Links – Help your readers learn more and discover new products by attaching associated links seamlessly and automatically adding links to keywords in your posts.
- WP Tasty Roundup – Effortlessly generate powerful roundup posts that enhance both your readers’ SEO and engagement.
Together, they make for a powerful combo that can really help you up your game.
Although my word is usually final around here, when it comes to your own site, you could play around with the WP Tasty plugin to get a good feel for its advantages yourself. Or, check out how I’ve put WP Tasty to use in our new Dank Budz recipe section. It’s easy to see how this plugin elegantly integrates into a WordPress website, driving an enjoyable and smooth user experience.
Discover New, Powerful Digital Tools To Drive Your Blog To The Top
Creating user-friendly, SEO-optimized sites is both an art and a science. Fortunately, the experienced digital marketing team at Eminent SEO is here to help. Whether you need to boost your traffic, monetize your blog, or shore up your ad spending, we have a solution for you. If you’re ready to take your site to the next level, get in touch with our enthusiastic and innovative marketing team.
