Why A Website Builder Instead Of A Free Blogging Platform
If youre just starting out with a food blog, you might be considering a free platform like Blogger or Tumblr. I recommend creating your own website from the get-go, as this gives you access to a wider range of features and saves you the hassle of having to transfer all of your content to a full website when you decide to scale up. While your own website is a bit more of an investment up front, it will pay off in the long term.
The Best Web Host For New Food Blogs:
BlueHost: I recommend Bluehost for beginners and growing blogs because its affordable, reliable, easy to set up, fast, and offers 24/7 customer support. Bluehosts starter plan is about as cheap as hosting gets.
With Bluehost, like all the other inexpensive hosts, youll pay for your plan upfront. Dont worry, thoughif for some reason you arent happy with Bluehost, you can cancel within 30 days for a full refund.
Good to know: Bluehost loves Cookie and Kate readers. Purchase your hosting through any of my links to Bluehost and youll get the best deal available. No promo code required.
Heres how to get the most from your Bluehost plan:
First, choose your plan. I recommend the basic plan, which is the least expensive and offers everything you need to get started.
Then, choose your term. In order to get your free domain name for a year and a significant discount on your monthly rate, youll need to pay for at least one year of hosting upfront. Feel free to choose a longer term if youre serious about blogging and want to save more money, but one year is a great start.
Lastly, choose your add-ons. The only add-on I would choose is Domain Privacy Protection, which will make sure your personal address and phone number are kept private. Otherwise, your personal information will be available to marketers and the general public. Please be safe!
Build Recipes Using Ingredients On Hand
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Html Food Website Templates
Premium HTML food website templates give you an advanced option for template customization, and you also get prioritized support from the template authors.
In the free food website template, you only get limited options. If you are on a budget, you can go for free templates. But if you are serious about your business, you know the answer. Most of the food website templates listed use HTML5, CSS3, and Bootstrap framework.
Install A WordPress Theme
A WordPress theme is basically a template that changes the design of your site.
In this case, the theme you select is also going to add a ton of functionality to help you build an amazing recipe website.
As I mentioned already, the Neptune theme is my top recommendation for your site.
Why use Neptune?
The Neptune theme has a crazy amount of practical features and customizable theme options included.
There are five different recipe layouts, but heres an extended look at the left image recipe layout.
It has so many cool elements like the nutrition info, the ingredients, and a great design for the steps. And there are loads more features.
You can add videos for each recipe, create a fully searchable recipe index, let visitors post reviews, and visitors can even register and submit their own recipes.
When it comes to marketing, Neptune supports rich snippets which means the user ratings will show up in the Google search results. This is extremely important for recipe sites.
Im still just scratching the surface. You can what else Neptune is capable of.
Alternative WordPress themes
While I think Neptune is awesome, its not the only recipe theme WordPress worth considering for your website.
Check out this collection of the top recipe themes for more great options.
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Create A Recipe Website
If you are having trouble finding a WordPress recipe theme, dont worry. There are a few options below that can help get you started. That being said, now that you are ready to start creating recipes, it is time to find a good WordPress recipe plugin.
For this tutorial, I found Recipe Maker For Your Food Blog. Lets take a look at how to use it.
Characteristics Of An Ideal Blog Name
- Descriptive
- Short
- Easy to spell
Once you have some potential names in mind for your blog, youll need to check their availability. Since .com is the standard domain suffix, keep trying potential names until you find one that is available in .com. Dont resort to hyphens or other punctuation marks to make it work .
Heres a handy domain name checking tool from Bluehost. Enter your desired domain name, hit Check domain and itll tell you if your domain name is available. If so, snatch it up quick!
Once you have picked your perfect domain name, you can get it for free with your BlueHost hosting plan. Buy your domain name now, before someone else does!
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Set Up Your Domain Name
As previously mentioned, this is a highly significant step. Come up with a great domain name that will resonate with your audiences and clarify what your blog is all about. You can create a new domain name now, use your existing domain name, or temporarily skip this step and come up with a name later.
What Is The Power Of A Cooking Website
A cooking website is a web resource that is promoted according to information requests of culinary and food topics. Besides presenting your services and sharing helpful information on cooking, you can even monetize your site and get additional money .
Nevertheless, making a cooking website is not an easy thing. Indeed, at this stage, you not only pledge the foundation of the entire project but also think about its future activities. Let us briefly consider some of the steps you need to perform to make a stunning cooking website.
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Tips For Designing A User
When youre tweaking the settings on your WordPress theme, keep the following in mind.
- Clear navigation: Keep your blog design clean and uncluttered, so visitors can find what theyre looking for.
- Encourage following: Place prominent links to your RSS feed, email subscription option and social media on every page.
- Dont require CAPTCHAs or ask visitors to login first.
- Suggest sharing: Provide social media sharing buttons at the end of each post.
Get Involved And Spread The Word
The food blogging scene is pretty big right now, and a great way to start getting your new blog some traction is to get your name out there. Most other websites, mine included, allow other users to leave comments on their articles.
This is a great way to get involved with discussions, and you can often include your web address as well as your new blogs name.
An added bonus is you can often get inspiration for your own articles, or a design feature you may want to try on your blog too.
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Create A Content Plan
If theres one thing that internet users love, its consistency. Your blog readers will want to know what they can expect from you, and most importantly when they can expect it.
If youre inconsistent with your posts and skip updating your blog for weeks on end, your readers will get the impression that youve either abandoned the food blog entirely or that youre not committed to it. Either way, theyll have no reason to stay committed to you.
To ensure that your blog keeps gaining attention, its a good idea to develop a posting schedule. Prepare content at least a week in advance to make this task easier on yourself, and rely on simple tools like a content calendar to stay on track.
Start Sharing Your Food With The World
To run a successful food blog, you need a strong website builder that can support every dream you have for it. Even if you start small, youll want the ability to grow and expand as much as your love of food does.
Which website builder is the best for your food blog? It depends on your goals.
- For the best combination of ease of use and advanced customization, try Wix. Your customization options are limitless, and its easy to add more storage, features, or whatever you need to keep growing your food blog.
- For a professional quality site that still has a user-friendly setup, look into Squarespace. Its templates are the perfect backdrop for your food photography, and expert help is abundant if you need assistance at any stage.
Heres an overview of the best features for each website builder:
| Builder |
| SEE DEALS |
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Why You Should Make A Website
The biggest benefit?
You get full control over your website.
You see, social platforms like Instagram actually control your followers. They set the parameters for how you can communicate with your audience and when you get more Instragram followers, youre helping them build their business as much as your own.
With your own website, you get to control every aspect of the design and decide exactly how you want to communicate with your fans.
The thing is, Instagram has a built-in audience and its hard to get traffic to your site at first. However, theres one thing most new webmasters dont realize.
Websites tend to hold onto their traffic for a long time once established and can consistently grow year after year.
In other words, it might take you a long time and a lot of work to make your first $1,000 from your site, but the next $1,000 will be so much easier.
With some elbow grease upfront, you can build a really great asset for your financial future.
Squarespace The Best For Newsletter Subscriptions
If youre wholly committed to building a premium, professional-looking food blog, Squarespace will deliver. It doesnt have a free plan , so its best if youre willing to make a higher financial investment in your food blog, or if you plan to monetize it.
Squarespace has stunning blog layouts, and while there arent any dedicated food blog layouts, its simple to adapt any template to your needs. The category and tag system is quite robust, allowing you to organize your posts and add blocks featuring related posts based on the tags. You can even create a recipe index to serve as a central reference point for everything you post and its easy to make it searchable too.
You can also modify your SEO elements right in the post, and youll get a preview to see what it looks like in search results. Blog content can be scheduled and pushed directly to social media accounts once they are connected, so you wont have to worry about your readers missing a post.
Squarespace BROWER template for food blogsLets take a closer look at some other great Squarespace features for food bloggers:
Read our expert Squarespace review for even more on the available features.
| Free plan available? |
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Six: Optimize Your Blog Content For Seo
Im sure youve heard the term SEO before, and maybe you know that SEO means search engine optimization. But what does it actually mean?
Search engine optimization is all about getting your content to show at the top of Google. Lets be honest, we all want to be that first link when you search for something, but its not so easy to do. Thats because lots of other websites are competing for the same spot.
The good news is that though it can take a while, you can do plenty of things to optimize your content for SEO and Google:
1. Do your keyword research. This is one of the most important steps when publishing a new article. Decide what keyword phrase you want that page to rank for and lookup the monthly search volume for that particular keyword phrase.
For example, the phrase meatloaf recipe, is going to be incredibly hard to rank for, expecially if youre just getting started. But keywords like air fryer meatloaf, traeger meatloaf, and ninja foodi meatloaf are going to be a LOT less competitive.
2.Mobile optimization is vital! People are forever scrolling and searching on their phones, so you need to make sure your website is optimized for mobile. Most WordPress themes are now fully mobile-optimized. But youll want to view your blog post on a mobile device before you hit the publish button.
3.Optimize your post title and description. Be sure to add your main keyword phrase towards the FRONT of your post title and description.
Start Your Own Food Blog: The Basic Steps
Here are the basic steps to set up a self-hosted WordPress food blog that is both beautiful and functional. Your blog will have your own domain name and your own distinct look, and it will be able to scale with you as your blog grows. When youre starting a food blog, I recommend following these steps for a greater shot at success.
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Free WordPress Recipe Themes
Finding the right WordPress theme to start a food or recipe blog can be tough. WordPress offers a ton of amazing themes, but many of them are premium. Take a look at these 3 free WordPress recipe themes that you may want to consider to get you started.
Foodie Blog
Foodie Blog is a simple WordPress theme designed to be a restaurant-review site or food blog. It is ideal for bloggers, newspapers, writers, or journalists who have websites.
It has a minimalist design, is lightweight, and is very customizable. This is a good theme to use to start.
Foodie World
Foodie World is a free Restaurant WordPress Theme has been crafted specially to help you create your very own stylish and delicious-looking website in only a few minutes.
Crafted with minimal design to put your food first, the Foodie World theme is a clean and fresh-faced restaurant or recipe WordPress theme. Its simple to install and easy to design.
Yummy
Yummy is a restaurant oriented theme that is also perfect for creating a recipe website. It features several different layouts and is very easy to customize with your colors, logo, and look.
Give it a try to get you going.
Best Food Website Templates For All Food Lovers 2022
With competition being stronger and stronger, you need solid food website templates to help you stand out from the masses.
Luckily, with any of the options that you find below, that will not be too big of a deal for you to achieve. We included only the most advanced and most promising HTML and WordPress solutions in this collection. These will help you realize your ideas easily and quickly.
The benefit of using a WordPress theme is adding food delivery services to your website. Of course, this is something you can add to an HTML template, but it does require coding work to make it happen.
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Choose Your Web Hosting Provider
Think of your domain name as your blogs home address. When someones searching for you, theyll find you there.
If your domain name is your address, your web hosting provider is your blogs house. Its the place where your blog lives online.
Web hosting providers are companies that can make your cooking blog accessible online. They provide servers and data centers and keep your blog connected to the internet. Bluehost is the #1 web hosting company recommended by WordPress.org
The best web hosting provider thats even recommended by WordPress.org is Bluehost.
It offers a free domain name in the first year and superior hosting services with a 30-day money-back guarantee. We have a special discount price of $2.75 for our readers.
Final Words: Which Is The Best Website Builder For Restaurants In 2022
The best is a relative concept as it totally shapes according to your needs. Thats why we dont want to point out one solid option here. The questions above might help to decide on what you really expect from the best platform for a restaurant website.
We have tried to streamline your decision-making process by striping down the best options. Whether you are a small or large business, these best website builders for restaurants can suit your requirements in different aspects. The key consideration here is what features exactly you need.
Still want to take a glance at the other solutions? You can discover more of the best website builders for restaurants here!
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How To Customize Your Site
With your WordPress site online and a new theme installed, youre nearly done with the initial setup work.
Installing a new theme only takes a minute. You can follow this installation tutorial to get your theme activated on your site.
Youll find that your site is pretty empty at first. Often times, it can be tough to learn exactly how your theme works without any content to test with. Neptune and most of the themes I recommended in the other collection have a demo data file you can import. Follow this guide on importing demo content and youll be done in no time.
Next, youll want to do a few basic site customization steps to get your site ready for the world.
Lastly, you can brand your site with the customization tools provided by your theme. Now, the tools included will depend on which theme you select, but heres a look at the documentation for Neptune. You dont need to read all of that! Most of the features are intuitive enough on their own, but its nice to know you can find help if you need it.