UX (user experience) is the interaction people have with your website or blog. It involves everything from the visual appeal of your food blog’s design to its message consistency and overall usability. UX directly affects how readers interact with your blog pages and whether or not they’ll keep coming back, over and over again. By implementing WordPress food blog strategies, you can generate interest in your content and strengthen relationships with your readers. This can be achieved by using visual elements and neat layout designs that deliver your message in a clear and persuasive way.
In this post, we’ll share our best WordPress food blog strategies to help you boost UX. We’ll also cover some useful tools that can improve the usability of your website.
#1: Use a WordPress food blog theme
If you’re running a food blog, one of the first things you’ll need is a WordPress food theme. It is designed to help you showcase food recipes, manage recipes, and accept front-end submissions.
A WordPress food blog theme is optimized for food blogs. It lets you add recipes and recipe videos to your site in a performance-optimized way. Most of these themes come with the pages you’d need on your food blog out of the box such as About Us and Recipe Index pages.
This means you’ll score better in SERPs due to better performance, helping you increase website visibility in SERPs, and boost organic traffic. In other words, it will make it easier for people to discover your website in search results.
Moreover, you need to ensure that your food blog is optimized for core web vitals. Check out our complete guide on how to optimize core web vitals to improve your food blog’s UX for more information.
Best WordPress food blog themes
We recommend using a WordPress food theme for your food blog. Here are some of the best WordPress food blog themes that can help you set up your food blog, magazine, or food ordering website:
- Foodica. Foodica is a handy food blog theme that lets you quickly create food blogs, magazines, and recipe sites. It offers six different color themes, a featured slider, a recipe index, and supports integration with WooCommerce. This theme is SEO friendly and its layout adapts seamlessly to all device sizes including desktop, tablets, and mobile phones.
- Gourmand. Gourmand is a popular WordPress theme that lets you create food-based blogs. It comes with many customization options so you can easily design your recipe pages. It is SEO-friendly and fully responsive so your food blog will look great on any device.
- Delicio. Delicio is a useful WooCommerce theme that helps you set up a website for your diner or restaurant. This theme is a go-to option for anyone looking to set up an online food ordering system. Its SEO-friendly design makes this theme perfect for making your blog mobile-ready.
- Cookely. Cookely is an SEO-friendly WordPress theme for those who need to create great-looking food blogs and magazines. It comes with a powerful Themes Options Panel that helps you easily customize any element to suit your particular requirements. Cookely is fully responsive on all device sizes.
#2: Use an SEO-friendly recipe card plugin
Don’t publish recipes like any other blog post. Instead, use an SEO-friendly recipe card plugin that has a format to help you upload and publish recipes. It is good for visual consistency and offers an easy way to display information like ingredients, cuisine, cooking time, servings, and instructions, and nutrition information.
An SEO-friendly recipe plugin for WordPress helps you ensure your recipe cards are optimized for search engines. In addition to this, rich snippets make your recipes look better in SERPs.
Recipe plugins automatically add Schema markup to your recipes. This increases the visibility of your food blog and its content as well as tells search engines like Google and social networks that your blog includes recipes and not just posts and pages.
Moreover, recipes look good on social media platforms and get you more visibility. This means, more people are likely to discover your recipe and click-through to read it.
Recipe Card Blocks is an SEO-friendly plugin that lets you set up great-looking food-based blogs and recipe sites. It comes with blocks for displaying recipe cards, recipe details, directions, ingredients, and nutrition facts.
#3: Collect feedback
It’s important to see what readers think of your food blog. Collecting feedback from your blog readers can help you gauge their satisfaction levels and identify areas that have room for improvement.
There are different ways to collect feedback. These include a star rating feature (for recipes), a comments box (it comes with WordPress out of the box), and a feedback form (you can use any form builder plugin).
Star ratings help encourage new users to try out your recipes e.g. a recipe that has a 4.7 star rating is likely to get lots of views. This way, you’re able to improve your food blog to deliver a better user experience.
Recipe Card Blocks is a handy WordPress plugin if you’re looking to create a food blog or recipe site. It lets you display star ratings next to your recipes and embedded videos in search results pages.
#4: Add an Instagram widget
Using an Instagram widget can help you show content from your Instagram feed on your food blog. It works by connecting your food blog with your Instagram account. This way, your Instagram posts will be displayed in your website’s sidebar or footer.
An Instagram widget can also display the user-generated content created and shared on your Instagram page. It collects content from Instagram through account handles, mentions, hashtags, and tags. This content can be in the form of images, GIFS, and videos.
This makes your food blog visually appealing and increases dwell time on your WordPress site. This also facilitates your blog readers as they don’t need to visit your Instagram page (they can view the content directly on your website).
Instagram Widget is a simple WordPress plugin that comes with a widget for displaying your Instagram feed. It’s easy to use and fully responsive. Other useful features include lazy load images, profile header, and follow button.
#5: Use social icons
Adding social icons directly on your food blog pages is a great way to encourage readers to follow your profile to stay updated with your content and recipes. Visitors can click the links to visit your social media profiles directly from the recipe or blog post they’re viewing.
Adding the social media platforms all in one place can help you build your online community on different social media platforms. It also helps readers connect with you on the social media channel of their choice.
Social Icons Widget is a WordPress plugin that lets you quickly add icons with links to your social media pages. It supports more than 400 social networks including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Tumblr. Moreover, it packs generic icons that you can use to link to anywhere you want.
Bonus tips
Here are some additional WordPress food blog strategies to help you optimize your WordPress food blog for better UX:
- SEO-friendly recipe titles. You can increase recipe visibility in SERPs by using the dish’s full name in the SEO title. For example, instead of “Grandma’s Cheese Melt Sandwich”, your SEO title should be “Grilled Cheese Sandwich”.
- High-quality photos. A great way to increase your food blog’s visual appeal is to use high-quality photos. Blog posts and recipes with high-quality photos are more likely to be shared.
- Recipe videos. Recipe video tutorials make it easier for the viewer to follow along, plus they’re ranked in YouTube search (second largest search engine behind Google).
- Jump to the recipe button. This site element helps readers that are in a hurry quickly get to the recipe, enhancing the user experience of your blog.
Time to implement WordPress food blog strategies
Improving the UX of your food blog isn’t rocket science. It’s pretty simple actually!
By following the tips we shared above, you’ll be able to highlight your blog’s content, improve its engagement rate, and get more social shares.
As a quick recap, here are the WordPress food blog strategies that will help you boost UX:
- A WordPress food blog theme can help you increase site visibility in SERPs and boost organic traffic.
- SEO-friendly recipe card plugins allow you to showcase recipes in a way that enhances visual consistency and ensures better visibility in SERPs.
- Collecting feedback from your blog readers helps you improve your content and increase user engagement with your blog.
- Adding an Instagram Widget to your food blog is a great way to make your website more vibrant and visually appealing.
- Social share buttons are useful for encouraging visitors to share your content with their followers.
Ready to implement these WordPress food blog strategies on your site? Get Foodica today! Also, be sure to check out our other WordPress food themes.
