2 Key Steps to Take Your WordPress Food Blog to the Next Level

Food blogs are dime a dozen, and as a food blog owner, I wouldn’t blame you for fearing that you’re getting lost in the ‘mix’ (awful pun gleefully intended). But how do you make your food blog stand out and ‘rise’ above the crowd? (Sorry – I’ll stop now.) Creating wonderfully inventive recipes and drool-worthy photos requires a certain je ne sais quoi, to adopt an appropriately French phrase, but on the other hand, you can create a WordPress Food Blog to utilize the power of WordPress in order to make your food blog far more compelling without having to exercise a single creative cell in your brain.

That’s what we’re going to focus on in this post: A small number of high impact things that you can do to take your WordPress food blog to the next level.

Bon appetit!

Step 1: Install a Top Notch Recipe Plugin for your WordPress Food Blog

The heart and soul of any food blog is the recipes. But simply writing them in the WordPress post screen text editor is no good at all. We can do much better than that.

From improved search rankings to print and share buttons, the following recipe plugins are well worth a look:

WP Ultimate Recipe

The free WP Ultimate Recipe plugin is fully responsive, which means that your recipes will look good on any device. The plugin is also optimized for Google Recipe Search, making it easier for people to find your creations.

There is also a premium version of this plugin that provides nutritional information for your recipes; it’s well worth a look.

Download WP Ultimate Recipe.

Recipe Card

The Recipe Card plugin offers several color, font and layout options, enabling users to easily create awesome looking recipes. Like WP Ultimate Recipe, this plugin is optimized for Google Recipe Search provided that you include a photo (which, let’s face it, is a must anyway).

Recipe Card also offers a (you guessed it) recipe card, enabling easier printing, nutritional facts, a recipe box, and the ability to write reviews.

Download Recipe Card.

Recipe Hero

Who can resist a plugin with a name like Recipe Hero?

This plugin makes adding a recipe to your WordPress blog simple by adding a custom post type. All recipes are automatically formatted for Google Rich Snippets and Pinterest Rich Pins.

Recipe Hero is 100% responsive and also offers recipe reviews and ratings.

Download Recipe Hero.

WordPress Food Blog Step 2: Choose a Beautiful WordPress Theme

Adding plugins will only take you so far when it comes to improving your food blog. In order to take things to the next level, you will need to select the best WordPress theme for your blog and its visitors.

The key things you should focus on are:

1. Responsiveness: Does your theme look fantastic across all the most popular devices?
2. Usability: Is your theme easy to navigate?
3. Design: Does your theme look fantastic, and does its design align with the style you’re going for?

When it comes to browsing for themes, you really get stuck down the rabbit hole. Bear the above three things in mind and take no prisoners – pick the theme that you’re sure is right for you.

Picking a theme is a really important step for any website, but food blogs in particular need to work responsively (how often do you look up recipes on your iPhone), be easy to navigate (ever got frustrated by a food blog that offers no obvious means to easily browse recipes?), and look great (the appreciation of food is so much about aesthetics, after all).

I recommend that you check out the following resources for themes:

1. WordPress.org for high-quality free themes. Be sure to check out themes’ average ratings and ‘last updated’ dates.
2. ThemeForest for a huge collection of premium themes. This marketplace can be a real bag, so only ever choose a theme that is highly rated and shows signs of regular updates and quality support.
3. aThemes’ 30+ Best Food Blog Themes roundup.

Conclusion

Taking your food blog to the next level does not have to be that hard – installing a top quality recipes plugin and a functional and aesthetically pleasing theme can work wonders.

Now it’s over to you – do you have any particular recommendations when it comes to food blog themes and plugins? Share with us in the comments section below!

Featured image courtesy of the Talisa theme.