Review: latest recipe plugins for WordPress

Feeling bamboozled about which recipe plugin to use with your WordPress blog? Katie Bryson takes a look at some of the latest WordPress recipe plugins on the digital foodie scene and chats to some of the bloggers who are using them.

But first of all why use recipe plugins at all?

What are the benefits of using a recipe plugin?

1.    They make your recipes clear and easy to read without lots of faffing about formatting the text
2.    Your readers will be able to print out your recipes more easily to use them for their cooking
3.    They create the schema markup that enables rich snippets so it shows up in Google’s recipe search with a little thumbnail image, without you having to code it yourself

What are the latest recipe plugins for WordPress?

1. Cookbook

Details: WP Site Care and Feast Design Co. have teamed up to deliver a recipe plugin after asking top food bloggers about their most desired features for this tool, as well as their frustrations with existing options. The resulting plugin is easy-to-use, attractive and with all of the technical features you’d hope for:

• Easy to use interface so it’s super simple to share your recipes
• Each recipe includes schema.org and JSON-LD recipe markup for those all-important Google search rankings
• Nutrition Data
• Rich formatting so it looks just the way you want it
• Easy to print and both desktop and mobile friendly
• ‘Jump to recipe’ function so your readers can get straight to it from the top of the post
• Recipe ratings system
• Developer Friendly – so you can make it look exactly how you want it to

Verdict: Food writer and blogger Ren Behan says, “I’m a big fan of recipe plugins because I think they make your recipes stand out a bit more within the body of your blog post, plus they make your post look more professional. I’ve used a couple of plugins over the years and most recently, I purchased and installed the CookBook recipe plugin – mainly because it was co-built by the designer of my site’s theme {Cook’Pro, Genesis Framework} so I knew it would work seamlessly with my blog. With this plugin you can now easily convert/move recipes across from existing plugins on your site, such as recipes in EasyRecipe and Zip List. There’s a bulk management screen which helps you see your recipes easily, readers can rate your recipes and also this particular recipe plugin looks great on mobile sites.”

Cost: $59.99
Purchase it (affiliate link)

2. WP Recipe Maker

The WP Recipe Maker WordPress plugin will allow you to add recipes to any post or page with automatic JSON-LD metadata for your recipes. It is fully responsive, and recipes will look good on any device. Quickly structure your ingredients and instructions in groups. Your visitors can easily print your recipes just with a click of a button. Other features of this WordPress plugin:

• Full-text searches for your pages
• Recipe ratings in the user comment
• Add photos to any step of the recipe
• Add recipes to any post or page
• Fallback recipe shows up when the plugin is installed
• Pinterest rich pins compatible
• Optimized for Google recipe search etc.

You can also pay extra for premium which includes access to:

• Premium Templates
• Adjustable Servings
• Kitchen Timer
• Ingredient Links
• Nutrition Label
• Priority Support

WP Recipe Maker Premium is also required if you want to use any of the upcoming Premium Add-Ons like Nutrition API, Unit Conversion, User Submissions and Meal Planner

Verdict: I use this plugin on my food blog Feeding Boys: “I’m a huge convert to recipe plugins, having previously been a bit fearful that they’d be fiddly to use. WP Recipe Maker is super simple to get the hang of,  it’s easy to input your ingredients and method and change the order of things if you’ve left something out. I like how clear it looks on my site and the fact that my readers can rate my recipes. It’d be good to have a few more templates to choose from, but I guess that’s where they make their extra cash on the Premium option.”

Cost: Free with optional £39 for Premium Add-Ons
Download Free Version

3. WP Tasty

• Moving from one recipe plugin to another can be a big pain, Tasty Recipes say they make it easy. Convert your recipes from EasyRecipe, Ziplist, Meal Planner Pro, or Yumprint Recipe Card into beautiful, functional Tasty Recipes.
• Converting all your recipes at the same time takes a giant leap of faith – and can often result in some surprises. So this plugin allows you to convert recipes one-at-a-time so that you can see exactly what you’ll be getting when you decide to take the jump.
• Recipe plugins aren’t just for looks. Behind the scenes, they make it possible for readers to find your recipes on search engines. Tasty Recipes uses both JSON and Microdata to provide an in-depth view of your recipe to search engines, including both Pinterest and Google.

Cost: $79
Purchase it

Verdict: Top Food Blogger Ciara Atwell from My Fussy Eater reckons “It’s a good plugin. The Bold Recipe card is particularly clever and different and I’ve had a few nice comments about it already. The only downside for me was installing it. It wasn’t as straightforward as they
made out!”

Have your say!

Which recipe plugins do you use? What new features would you like to see future plug-ins with? We’d love to hear your comments so add them below.