Create an Epic Food Blog with These WordPress Themes and Plugins

Create an Epic Food Blog with These WordPress Themes and Plugins

If you have a passion for cooking up delicious dishes and would love to share your creativity in the kitchen with the world, then starting a food blog could be the perfect outlet for your talents.

Thankfully, WordPress and its assorted array of purpose built themes and plugins makes it very easy to start your own food blog today. In this post we will be taking a look at a selection of the best WordPress themes to give your new blog the right look and feel, while also covering the most useful plugins that allow you to publish recipes on your blog and ensure your content is easy to find by those searching for inspiration.

Food blogging can be lots of fun and a great way to share your creations with other cooks and connect with like-minded foodies from around the world. A popular food blog can also become a great money maker if you get the ingredients right.

So if the idea of starting a food blog appeals – or you want to give your existing website an upgrade – read on for our recommended food-related themes and plugins to find out how to create an epic food blog with WordPress.

Best WordPress Food Themes

These themes have all been purpose built to help you create a professional looking food blog with WordPress.

Some of the best features found in these themes include support for users on mobile devices, especially those following along on their iPads; custom built recipe templates; plenty of customization options; and of course highly attractive designs.

  • iCook

    The homepage arrangement of the iCook theme should immediately grab the attention of your visitors, thanks to the large featured images from each recipe that are on display. Upon clicking through to an individual recipe, visitors are greeted with a high resolution, full width photograph, coupled with information about the dish and the nicely formatted step by step cooking instructions.

    Each individual recipe that you add to your blog can also features its own gallery. This allows you to add a selection of helpful photos of the dish as it progresses from start to finish.

    As well as the individual recipe galleries, iCook includes a site-wide gallery section which allows your visitors to quickly view an index of all of your published dishes, before diving into the individual recipes to get the full cooking details. The recipes in the gallery can be quickly filtered by your visitors according to the custom categories you’ve created.

    iCook is a great choice for anyone looking for a clean and stylish template for their food blog that will really let their photographs stand out on the page, while also being very easy to navigate.

  • Foodie Pro

    Foodie Pro is a minimalist theme that will appeal to chefs and bloggers who want their culinary creations and food shots to take center stage on their website.

    While the overall design is clean and crisp, you do get access to a good amount of settings for customizing the colors and typography in use by your website. All the modifications take place through the WordPress theme customizer tool, making it very easy to personalize your website without the need to edit any code.

    Foodie Pro includes strategically placed ad spaces which will be of interest to anyone who is looking to monetize their website with adverts, or promote their own related products. There is also a custom built widget for displaying lists of your latest and greatest recipes, as well as an attractive template for publishing those recipes.

    This theme runs on the ever popular Genesis Framework and has been designed and developed by Shay Bocks, an experienced WordPress consultant.

  • Café Pro

    Whether you are blogging about the food you create in your kitchen or the eateries you dine at, Café Pro is a great choice for your WordPress food blog.

    This food friendly theme is another creation that has been built for the Genesis Framework from StudioPress. This means that Café Pro leans more towards the minimalist approach to web design, rather than overwhelming you and your visitors with all the latest bells and whistles. The result of this is a fast loading website that is both easy to navigate and manage.

    However, Café Pro still gives you the ability to make use of a full screen layout, parallax scrolling, a landing page template, and a range of customization options. These features, along with the detailed set up instructions, makes it very easy to get your blog up and running in the way that you want it.

    With a design optimized for tablet and smartphone users, whether you are creating a website for a restaurant or starting your own food blog, Café Pro includes all the aspects you need to make your project a success.

  • Food Blog

    Food Blog has been created by Nimbus Themes and it’s a great choice for anyone who wants a home for their high quality photographs of food and drink. Whether you are publishing your own recipes or blogging about the best dishes you’ve recently eaten, this theme makes a great home for your content.

    The aptly named Food Blog has been built to seamlessly integrate with the free Recipe Card plugin. This add-on makes it easy to add attractively formatted recipes to your website with very little effort. Each recipe post includes room for a large image, a description, and the ingredients list and cooking instructions.

    Recipes also include handy save and print buttons, as well as the ability for readers to leave a feedback rating. Your visitors can quickly find the dishes they are looking for by using the recipe index, or filtering your content using the custom categories.

    This theme has already been used to great effect on a number of food blogs, so if you are looking for inspiration for your website, be sure to check out the user showcase on the Food Blog website.

Best WordPress Food Plugins

These are the best free and premium plugins for turning a regular WordPress website into a fully functioning food blog.

Some of the benefits of using these plugins is that they make it much easier and faster to add recipes to your website. Many of the plugins include custom forms which you simply fill in with the relevant details to add your recipes to your blog. Upon publishing your post, the recipe content is nicely formatted, giving your recipes a professional touch with very little effort.

Many of these recipe plugins add save and print buttons to your recipes to make life easier for your visitors. Now that Google has added a recipe finder to its search engine, you can also use these plugins to ensure your recipes are formatted correctly for inclusion in Google Recipe View.

If you want to make your recipes look better, while also increasing the chances of people finding them in Google, then installing one of these plugins is highly recommended.

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  • Recipe Card

    Recipe Card is a free plugin that integrates nicely with the above Food Blog theme, although it should work well with any modern WordPress theme.

    After activating the plugin on your website you can choose a template for your recipes and then start creating new content. The plugin integrates with the WordPress post editor and allows you to insert your recipe information directly into your blog posts, before they are formatted and presented using your chosen template.

    This plugin gives your recipes a consistent and professional makeover, complete with save and print buttons for the convenience of your visitors. By using this plugin on your food blog, your recipes will now be ready for the Google Recipe View search engine, making it easier for more people to find your great dishes.

  • Yummly Rich Recipe

    Yummly Rich Recipe is another free plugin designed to help you publish your recipes in style on your WordPress blog.

    As the name suggests, this plugin has been created by the Yummly recipe sharing website team and allows your visitors to save your recipes directly to their Yummly account. This not only makes it easy for them to find their way back to your food blog in the future, but also increases the chance of others finding your website.

    Once the plugin has been activated, you can customize how it works through the settings page. This allows you to configure how your recipes will look when published and printed out, as well as how to display your ingredients list. Through the settings page you can also decide what other information to include in the recipe template, helping you to ensure your dishes follow a similar format.

    When it comes to adding the recipes themselves, it’s just a case of pressing the Yummly button on the post editor and then entering the information in the relevant fields.  The plugin will also make your recipes SEO-friendly and help them rank more prominently in the Google Recipe View search engine in order to get more traffic to your blog.

    Interested in Yummly Rich Recipe?

  • WP Ultimate Recipe

    WP Ultimate Recipe adds a new custom post type to your website that allows you to add detailed recipes to your food blog. These recipes are then published using a purpose built template provided by the plugin.

    The plugin also adds a range of custom taxonomies to your site to enable you to categorize and tag your recipes based on their cuisine and course. You can also add reusable ingredients to your site for quick insertion into your recipes.

    By taking the custom post type and custom taxonomies approach to adding the recipes to your site, you can ensure your recipe content is kept separate from your regular blog content. This not only makes it easier to manage your blog, but also easier for your visitors to find what they are looking for on your website.

    This plugin is available in a free version and a premium version, so if you want to give it a try you can access the basically functionality and see how you get on.

    If you are happy with the pre-built recipe template and layout, then the free version could be a good choice. However, if you do want to make the most of this plugin then you will need to upgrade to the premium or professional license.  Doing so gives you access to the template editor for customizing how your recipes look, adding the ability to accept user submissions, an options for importing recipes from other sites, and a lot of other useful features.

    The premium version of WP Ultimate Recipe might be relatively expensive, but if you are planning on starting your own fully functioning online recipe resource, rather than just a humble food blog, it could well be worth the investment.

    Interested in WP Ultimate Recipe?

  • Recipe Hero

    Recipe Hero is another plugin that adds a custom post type to your WordPress website that is used specifically for storing and publishing recipes.

    The plugin has a nice set of options for those that like more control over how their website works and the recipes are nicely presented when they go live on your blog. You also get the option of adding responsive image galleries to your recipes to help your readers follow along. If your audience look high quality photos of food, then the gallery feature will help you ensure your blog appeals to them.

    While the core plugin is free, there are a number of premium extensions available for Recipe Hero. These add-ons allow you to add responsive videos to your recipes, make your content printer-friendly, and allow your readers upload their own recipes to your site using a front-end submission form.

    For a professional free option that can be upgraded with premium add-ons when your blog gets more popular, Recipe Hero gives you lots of room for expansion.

  • Cooked

    Cooked is a premium recipe theme that is included with the Yumblog theme mentioned earlier. However, you can use it on any food blog, regardless of the WordPress theme you’ve chosen.

    Cooked is now on version 2.0 and the developers have added some great new features to the existing set, as well as ironed out some kinds from the first version. By installing this plugin on your website you can now publish attractive looking recipes with ease, simply by entering the dish details into the form that Cooked adds to your website.

    The search functionality has been improved to make it easier for your visitors to find your best recipes. If you enable this feature, visitors can also submit their own creations to your blog through the attractive front end submission forms. Furthermore Cooked includes a drag and drop builder for creating your own custom recipes. When publishing your recipes, this plugin gives you 10 page template to choose from that will determine how they look.

    If you don’t mind investing in the price of this plugin, then Cooked gives you a lot more features to work with when building your food blog, as well as giving you access to premium support should you run into any problems along the way.

Conclusion

Starting your own food blog has never been easier and by using WordPress and one of these purpose built food themes and recipe plugins, you can make the whole process even easier.

If you’d rather focus on creating amazing dishes in the kitchen, rather than worrying about the technical aspects of your website, then these themes and plugins give you the ability to do so. Whether you are just starting out or want to upgrade your existing blog to make it more food-friendly, then you can’t go wrong with the above options.

Which theme did you like the best? What style of food are you planning to cover on your blog? Are there any features you’d like to add to your blog that haven’t been made available yet?  Please share your thoughts in the comments below.

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Aileen Javier Aileen has over 10 years of experience in content writing and content marketing. She’s handled content teams, planned editorial calendars, and managed projects. She’s also written blogs, web copy, social media posts, and email newsletters for brands in different industries.