Whether you run a food blog or occasionally need to share recipes with your readers, having a plugin that lets you easily add recipes to WordPress will save you a ton of time.
A recipe card plugin makes it easy to quickly add recipes to your website and present them in a delightful way. This is also a great way to deliver a good user experience and encourage people to bookmark printable recipes.
In this article, I’ll show you step-by-step how to add recipe cards in WordPress using the Recipe Card Blocks plugin. I’ll also explain how you can customize the recipe card in a variety of different ways.
Let’s put everything into context before we begin.
Why You Might Want to Share Recipes
There are plenty of scenarios where you might want to share recipes with your readers.
If you run a food blog, you need an easy way to share recipes with readers in the most engaging way possible. With a recipe card plugin, you can add recipes to WordPress in a few simple steps. Ideally, you’d want to go with a recipe plugin that lets you add recipes quickly and easily, and looks great on the front-end.
I also recommend using a WordPress food blog theme so readers get the best possible experience on your website. I’d suggest checking out Foodica PRO, Gourmand, or Cookely.
Even if you don’t have recipes of your own to share, you might want to curate recipes occasionally for your readers. For example:
- Weight watchers. If you have a weight watchers blog, you might want to share low-calorie meal recipes with your readers.
- Intermittent fasting. You could create a series of recipes that help people practicing intermittent fasting eat healthy.
- Bodybuilding. If you run a bodybuilding website, your followers might be interested in meal plans. You could offer recipes to go with the recommended meals.
Similarly, if you’re a chef, you might want to share recipes with your audience through your business website.
Many chefs choose to share recipes with people who sign up for their paid membership program.
Upgrade Your Website with a Premium WordPress Theme
Find a theme that you love and get a 20% discount at checkout with the FLASH20 code
Choose your theme
How to Add Recipe Cards to WordPress Using Recipe Card Blocks
As a WordPress website owner, there are a few different ways you can add recipes to WordPress.
Method 1: You could simply write them in a WordPress post as you would with any other blog post. The problem with this is that it becomes difficult to maintain consistency.
Method 2: Another way to add recipes to WordPress is by creating a custom post type. However, this requires a fair amount of technical knowledge and can be difficult to manage on the back-end.
Method 3 (preferred method): Arguably the easiest way to add recipes to WordPress is by using the Recipe Card Blocks plugin. It lets you use a pre-designed recipe card template to fill out your recipe and publish it on your website. The best part is that it automatically adds schema markup to your recipes so they show up in search engine results pages, enabling you to drive organic traffic to your food blog.
For those unfamiliar, schema markup is structured data added to your content that helps search engines better understand and categorize your recipes. It can improve how your content appears in search results by enabling rich features such as star ratings, cooking times, ingredient lists, calorie information, and other recipe details directly on the search results page. Here’s what it looks like:
Here’s what you’ll need to add recipes to WordPress using the Recipe Card Blocks plugin:
- A WordPress website with a food blog theme (we’re using the Foodica PRO theme)
- The Recipe Card Blocks plugin
- Some recipes that you want to share with readers
Step #1: Get the Recipe Card Blocks Plugin
If you haven’t done so already, get Recipe Card Blocks and install it on your WordPress website.
Once that’s done, navigate to Recipe Card > Settings from the WordPress admin panel and activate the license key. Click the Activate License button to proceed.
Step #2: Create a Recipe Card
Recipe Card Blocks works with WordPress’ latest Gutenberg editor. This means that you can simply add a recipe card block to any page or post on your website. Alternatively, you can go to Recipe Cards > All Recipes from the WordPress admin panel and click the Add New Recipe button to add your recipe.
Give your recipe a suitable title. You’ll see a recipe card is automatically created for you in the Gutenberg editor. It should look something like this at this point:
All you need to do is open up the Settings sidebar, click on the Block tab, and enter your recipe’s details.
The Recipe Card Blocks plugin lets you add:
- Recipe card image
- Print button and Pinterest button
- Title and author
- Recipe video
- Course, cuisine, difficulty, and keywords
- Cooking details like servings, preparation time, cooking time, and calories
- Custom details (if you’d like, for example, resting time or which season it’s best enjoyed in)
- Ingredients (with amount and unit)
- Step-by-step preparation directions
- Any additional notes
Once you’re done filling out the recipe card with your own recipe, go to Settings > Recipe from the same screen and copy the shortcode:
Step #3: Create a New Post or Page
Next, add the Shortcode block to any page or post where you want to display the recipe and paste the shortcode in it. It should look something like this:
And here’s what it will look like on the front-end:
Bonus: Add Nutrition Information
Depending on the type of food blog you’re running, you might consider publishing nutrition information for the recipes you share.
Adding nutrition information to your recipes is a great way to deliver a better user experience to nutrition-minded readers. This way, they won’t have to calculate nutrition information for the recipe themselves. Nutrition information is particularly helpful to readers who are watching their weight or those on a specific diet plan.
One of the key benefits of using the Recipe Card Blocks plugin is that it comes with a block for adding nutrition information to your posts. This means that you can add nutrition information for each recipe you add to your food blog.
Here’s what you need to do:
Add the Nutrition block at the bottom of your recipe. This will add a nutrition information template to the post similar to what you see on the back of food items.
All you have to do is fill out the Nutrition Facts boxes with nutrition information. It allows you to enter information about calories, total fat (as well as saturated fat and trans fat), cholesterol, sodium, sugars, dietary fiber, protein, vitamins, and much more.
Alternatively, you can use the Recipe Analyzer tool to do this for you automatically. Just copy-paste the list of ingredients and servings, and click the Analyze Recipe button.
The tool lets you see the calories for each ingredient in a neat table layout. It also shows you Daily Nutrition Progress, Health Score, and full Nutrition Breakdown. You can use the information from the Nutrition Breakdown section to fill out the nutrition label for your recipe.
The premium version of the tool also lets you generate and download FDA-compliant nutrition labels for your recipes.
Conclusion
The Recipe Card Blocks plugin makes it easy for anyone running a food blog or cooking blog to add recipes to their website. You can customize the recipe cards to get the exact look and feel you want.
The plugin also lets you add nutrition information to your recipes which is a great way to deliver more value to your blog followers. In addition to this, your recipes will include schema markup which means search engines and social media platforms will display them in a neat way encouraging people to click.
Ready to create professional-looking recipe cards for your food blog? Get Recipe Card Blocks today!
