Finding the best WordPress plugins for your food blog can be a challenging task especially since there are loads of options to choose from. From powerful SEO plugins to beautiful image sliders, there are numerous ways to extend the functionality of your site.
If you are finding it difficult to figure out which plugins to install in order to beautify and optimize your site we have got your covered. Here is a list of software add-ons that we believe are the best ones or rather must-haves for food bloggers.
5 Essential WordPress Plugins for Food Bloggers
1. ZipList Recipe Plugin
When you scroll through a recipe blog post and witness a well-organized recipe with an option to print in the end, that’s usually a recipe plugin. While there are several such plugins available for WordPress, ZipList is what we recommend. Not only it helps to make those killer recipes more SEO-friendly but also improves the rate that they show up in a Google’s recipe search. Moreover, ZipList makes it easy to print the recipes for your readers and allows them to save it to their recipe box.
2. Pinterest Plugin
It’s no secret that Pinterest drives a lot of traffic to food blogs and that’s why it’s a good idea to make it easy for your readers to pin your content to their boards. The free Pinterest “Pin It” Button plugin inserts a “Pin It” feature in each of your blog posts, whereas Pinterest Button Attraction is a premium version that makes a customizable “Pin It” button appear over each of your images on mouse over.
3. Google Rich Snippets
When you search for a specific recipe in Google, do you notice some of the results show up a little thumbnail of the recipe image? How cool is that, isn’t it? It at once grabs the attention of the audience making them much more likely to click on the search result. This is possible due to the Google rich snippets plugin.
4. WordPress SEO by Yoast
We cannot stress enough that search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the most important elements of a successful blog. And that’s where SEO by Yoast plugin comes in. It helps to maximize your blog’s SEO potential by making sure that every single post and page you publish can be found on all search engines.
5. WP Smush.it
Another most recommended plugin especially for image heavy sites such as food blogs. It helps to reduce the size of the images thereby helping in improving page load speed and overall performance. And it goes without saying that the faster your site loads, the more search engines will like it.
If the mere thought of coding a website overwhelms you, WordPress plugins are your best friend. They help to make your site more interactive and professional looking, without the need of actually knowing how to code. While it’s really a good stuff for non-techie folks, make sure to install only the necessary ones. Installing too many or unnecessary plugins can cause your blog serious problems such as slowing its load time considerably.