8 Best WordPress Recipe Plugins 2024
Many people, such as top chefs, moms who cook four meals a day, bachelor boys who can cook a simple meal, and anyone who can whip up a storm in the kitchen, want to share their cooking experience online. What better way to do it than to start a food blog. If you’re using WordPress, you’ll be glad to know that there are many food blog themes and some WordPress recipe plugins to help you get started. You can even fine-tune the themes for more specific niches, like bakeries, coffee shops, or takeaway eateries.
WordPress recipe plugins help you publish your recipes without much fuss, optimize them to be search-engine-friendly, and focus on delighting the readers with convenient options. A template where you must paste your recipe and upload images would be a time saver. Search engine optimization is primarily achieved by ensuring the plugin complies with Schema.org and hRecipe.
Below are some recipe plugins and their features.
Free Recipe WordPress Plugins
You do not have to shell out any money to use recipe plugins. There are many quality plugins available for free download on the WordPress repository. On this list, you’ll find the often-downloaded and better-rated plugins.
1. WP Recipe Maker
The main advantage that WP Recipe Maker offers is a smooth workflow in creating and publishing your recipe. The metadata is added automatically, and this helps improve search engine rankings.
You can add photos at any step of the recipe and have a fallback recipe to display if the plugin is disabled. All the ingredients and instructions can be arranged in groups to make it easy for visitors. A clean print version with an optional credit byline is available. You can also migrate content from other plugins to WP Recipe Maker.
Users can search the text of the recipe and rate the recipe in the Comments. Recipes are huge on Pinterest; you’ll be happy that the plugin is compatible with Pinterest Rich Pins. The premium version offers links to other recipes for ingredients, adjusts servings, displays nutrition labels, and allows you to choose from several templates.
More info / Download2. Zip Recipes
Zip Recipes has several features that put your recipes at the forefront with Google. It helps to increase traffic by fine-tuning SEO and includes a blog URL in the recipe. You can also add and affiliate other links to your recipes.
Besides, it’s not difficult at all to format the recipe and to add images. You’ll not have to mess with any custom post types. Create a recipe inside a post, and add images using Media Library. The plugin has a limited number of templates and a few styling options. If you wish, though, you can customize it with CSS.
You’ll have an additional note field to mention optional ingredients, any special appliances required, additional instructions, or quick tips. The plugin automatically adds the post name to recipes and images.
The premium plugin offers additional features like a nutrition calculator, recipe card designs, a recipe index, author setting, visitor rating, and more. The plugin offers support for AMP pages and for multilanguage capability, including a blog in multiple languages.
More info / Download3. Recipe Card Blocks
Whoever runs a food-related website and enjoys using Gutenberg, Recipe Card Blocks by WPZOOM will be a great addition to your page. The plugin creates neat blocks you can use with Gutenberg editor and implement into your web design. Indeed, the recipe card also comes with Schema markup. In short, Recipe Card Blocks allows you to effortlessly make and add refreshing recipes featuring ingredients and directions to your website.
Out of the box, Recipe Card Blocks delivers two styles and just enough features to get you going immediately. You can now create a single block for the recipe card or a full-blown recipe with images, ingredients, and instructions. Of course, with future plugin updates, you can also expect even more goodies to drop, which you will take to your advantage.
More info / Download4. Blossom Recipe Maker
Your tasty recipes deserve extra shine in the form of a stunning presentation. With Blossom Recipe Maker, you can make it happen in little to no time. This WordPress recipe plugin is all you need if running a mouthwatering food blog. You can have a full recipe live and ready to attract more like-minded people in minutes. They are hungry to try your creations and can now follow a simple process thanks to Blossom Recipe Maker.
Additionally, you can create a single post with the plugin or add it to existing blog posts or pages. Moreover, users can also play around with servings, check ingredients, and mark their progress. Yes, Blossom Recipe Maker is very interactive. When working with the remarkable Blossom Recipe Maker plugin, you can benefit from many more features. Add videos, allow visitors to print your recipes, and even translate them if necessary. Get your salivating dishes out there with the help of Blossom Recipe Maker.
More info / Download5. RecipePress
RecipePress, hence the name, is a free WordPress recipe plugin that you can use to enrich your food blog with inspiring recipes. It creates a custom post in your WordPress admin, which you can use to style your mouthwatering recipes beautifully and publish them on your blog. Of course, RecipePress is also compatible with default posts, not needing to use the custom post type exclusively. It is a tool you will find a breeze to use, offering you all the necessary.
Some features of RecipePress are serving size, preparation and cooking times, ingredient and instruction grouping, nutritional information, and a few different layouts for how you would like the recipe to appear on your page. Of course, the design is also entirely flexible and responsive, so it appears on mobile and desktop devices beautifully.
More info / Download6. Create
Create is an all-around, flexible, and powerful WordPress plugin you can easily use to showcase your tasty recipes. Instead of styling and customization from scratch, let Create do all the hard work for you. With this free plugin, you can create eye-catching cards that support all sorts of content you would like to publish on your website. Including recipes, of course!
Create is also 100% SEO-friendly, ensuring your content gets ranked higher in the search engines and more traffic. Still, content is king, meaning focus on the best possible quality and not just on the fact that you publish as much as you can. In short, quality over quantity – always.
A few extras that Create comes with are five predefined designs: lightweight structure, live preview, and responsiveness. Last but not least, you can even use Create for website monetization.
More info / DownloadPremium Recipe WordPress Plugins
Premium plugins offer additional features and a greater degree of support. Regarding recipe plugins, you’ll also find greater customization options with premium plugins. Some of the favorites with users are on the list below.
7. Cookbook
Cookbook is the first product put out by SiteCare. They promise publishing a recipe will be as easy as pie with this plugin. It takes care of SEO with the help of schema.org and the JSON-LD recipe markup. Additionally, it provides an opportunity to stand out in search results with nutrition data for Google Rich Cards.
The plugin is responsive, and enables rich formatting and hyperlinks in recipe content. Users do not have to scroll to the bottom to find their desired recipe. A shortcode at the top can immediately take them to the recipe at the bottom. Further, it allows users to rate the recipes.
With hooks and filters, developers can change how the front-end appears to visitors. This plugin is translation-ready, making it easy for publishers and readers to navigate. More importantly, you’ll not have to choose between important features.
More info / Purchase8. Total Recipe Generator
With Total Recipe Generator, you can post recipes using prebuilt templates and with drag-and-drop ease. The content generated by the plugin is a mix of schema and JSON LD micro data, internal links, and suitable meta tags for recipe-type content. So, there’s no need for additional effort at search engine optimization.
The plugin ships as a WPBakery Page Builder add-on and supports back-end and front-end page builder. It supports recipes on pages, posts, and custom post types. It automatically adds up preparation and cooking time to display the total time. You can resize recipe images to custom size and use the built-in nutrition label creator to display nutritional facts.
Internal linking support for metadata, author name, and author URL support exists. The plugin has built-in social sharing buttons and is compatible with standard WordPress themes. Besides, it’s translation-ready and supports RTL languages.
More info / PurchaseTo Wrap Up
A recipe plugin can transform your WordPress website into a recipe website. Your choice of the plugin should be guided by the features you need and your audience’s preferences. Newbies may initially prefer a plugin with fewer options and features and then move on to a feature-rich plugin. As for users, they get to discover different cuisines and many recipes, from the easy-to-prepare to the most elaborate ones.
Thanks for the great article. It really helped me narrow down the recipe plugins I want to try out for my blog; however, I did notice that a few of the featured plugins have not been updated in years. Such as Recipe Card (4 years ago), Yummly Rich Recipes (2 years ago), and Recipe Hero (3 years ago). I’m going to try out Cooked, Zip Recipes, and WP Recipe Maker.
Thank you for reporting it! We have cleaned up the list.
Hi,
I appreciated all your info about recipe plugins; however, I am scared to change from zip list because the newer plugins sound so daunting to me. I have been food blogging for three years, but I am still NOT geeky. If I decided to change my recipe plugin, would it be as easy as deactivating one and activating the new one?
Joan,
It depends on many different factors meaning that there is no guarantee.
Always backup your site before installing/removing plugins or doing other changes to your website. You can never be too sure. If anything fails just restore your site from the backup and you will be good to go.
In a more advanced level you should use staging environment when testing because doing changes on a live site is not a way to go because it can go down easily. That’s why we use Kinsta which offers staging environment with a click of a button.
Hi Joan,
We developed the recipe plugin Meal Planner Pro Recipes as an extension of the ZipList plugin. The way you create your recipe cards will be very familiar to ZipList and you can convert all of your recipes with the click of a button. Easy to use and conversion is done in seconds.
Once installing and activating our plugin you can deactivate ZipList. Also, if not completely satisfied, you can convert back to ZipList with the click of a button.
@ Aigers – thanks for including our plugin in your review. We’ve made a ton of enhancements since posting. This includes Gutenberg editor compatibility, Google Assistant enabled, the latest Google schema markup requirements, nutrition analyzer, tag and keyword manager etc. our plugin is free but would be considered a “Premium Plugin”. Please check out our WP plugin page for all the latest.
Thank you so much for this post! It has really helped with choosing a recipe plugin. I appreciate the work that went into creating it. 🙂