Choosing A Theme For Your Food Blog
WordPress themes control your websites design and appearance. There are thousands of free and paid WordPress themes that you can install on your website.
However, not all of them are suitable for a food blog. Youll need one suited to a food blog, and that matches your ideas on design and branding.
Here are a few options you can choose
1. Get a Free Theme
One advantage of a popular platform like WordPress is the number of free themes out there. People have created thousands of them that you can use on your blog.
Heres a roundup of popular themes for recipe and food blogs to get you started.
2. Pay for a Premium Theme
Premium themes are designed by experts. They are usually visually more appealing than the free ones, have more features and functions built into them. They also come with support, so you can get help if you need it.
We recommend using Divi or Astra, as theyve both got great free starter themes and lots of customization options that work well for food blogs.
3. Create a New Theme
If you want a unique and original theme for your food blog, you can pay for a custom-designed WordPress theme. This is an expensive option and can take months to complete. Its a good future option for your food blog if it becomes a hit, and you have thousands of dollars to spend on an original theme.
Or, you can create a custom WordPress theme with SeedProd, which is affordable and easy .
Ready To Create Your Business Start Your Free 14
If youre still searching for a name for your blog, Shopifys business name generator can be a helpful resource to spark some extra creativity. Just input a word that describes your brand and the name generator will pop out some suggestions. For example, input kitchen or table or meals and see what results you get!
Select and host your domain
Some blog platforms will help you purchase and host your new domain, which can be a slightly painful task. Shopify, Squarespace, and WordPress all have this feature. Your domain should be as close as possible to your actual name for branding recognition. If its not available, add a filler word like get or shop to the beginning.
Design a logo
Shopify also offers a free professional-quality logo maker, called Hatchful, that will create a logo for you to choose from in a matter of seconds. Just select your business category , add your business name, and select where youll use your logo, and Hatchful will generate a selection of logos you can edit and personalize to your taste.
Pick a theme and a design
These platforms have a large selection of themes to choose from, so pick the one that best suits your brand.
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Write Articles To Answer Food
For example, if youve written an article about the different sake substitutes, you could call the article Sake Substitutes but that isnt very enticing to people when choosing which site to click.
Need a Substitute for Sake in a Recipe? Heres 4 Perfect Alternatives is what I went for in this instance. A creative, descriptive but relevant title. It shows visitors the question they want answering, giving them confidence to click through to my blog in search results.
Read Also: Healthy Low Carb Low Fat Recipes
How To Create A Food And Recipe Website
A food and recipe website is a great place to share recipes and educate people on a particular topic. You can start a food and recipe website from scratch or use a ready-made template. Both of these options have their benefits. A food and recipe website is easy to create and maintain, and is a great way to share recipes with other people. By using these tools, you can start a successful food and ingredient website.
Recipes are an important part of any meal. It is important to choose healthy recipes and read labels. In addition to recipes, you should stock your kitchen with the right ingredients and use the proper cooking methods. You should know all about special diets and how to cook healthy dishes. There are also many tips on how to make healthier food and find the perfect recipe. So, dont wait any longer start using these tools today! It is the future of the food and recipe industry.
Recipes can be categorized based on the type of ingredients used. The best food and recipe websites are designed to be easy to use and have comprehensive search engine optimization features. A food and recipe website should also feature a menu, ratings, and a contact form. A good recipe website should have easy-to-use menus and an organized layout. If you are unsure of the best recipes to use, you can start by visiting one of the many recipe sites that offer these features.
What Are Recipe Websites
Recipe websites are websites that provide recipes for various dishes and foods. They often include pictures of the finished dish, as well as ingredients and instructions on how to make it. Many recipe websites also have ratings and reviews from users, so you can see what others thought of the recipe before trying it yourself.
Read Also: Best Green Smoothie Recipes For Weight Loss
How To Install And Configure Blog Software
So now that we have an address and a place for our website to live, we can dive into how to setup a WordPress website on the server. WordPress is going to be the software that powers your website. But before it can power your website it needs to be installed on your hosting server.
Heres how to install and configure WordPress
Content Structure Of Cooking Websites
A cooking website should have a clear content structure. The navigation menu should offer easy and fast redirection to chosen elements. Various categories and subcategories and drop-down menus are also welcomed as they help find tutorials and recipes in a blink of an eye.
In addition, feedback is vital for cooks and cooking schools, so adding the contact form, a blog with comments, feedback pop-up , and various social plugins to the cooking website template will be a great idea to be in touch with your visitors. It allows them to share ideas about recipes, products or cooking techniques. For visitors who want to get notifications about new recipes or events, the sign-up form and the countdown timer will be useful and make them expect events or discounts even more.
Read Also: Healthy Hidden Valley Ranch Dressing Recipe
Get An Awesome Domain Name
Youre probably familiar with domain names.
A domain name is simply the address you type into your browser to visit a site. This websites domain name is competethemes.com.
What you may not know is that finding available domain names is incredibly challenging. This is one of the reasons why hundreds of generic top-level domains were added last year.
For instance, you can get domains that end in .academy or .blog instead of .com.
If this is all a bit confusing dont worry, I have a complete guide to finding an awesome domain name you can follow along with.
That guide will help you find a domain you love for just $10-15 so you can avoid paying a domain squatter thousands of dollars.
Install And Activate Starter Templates
Stater Templates is an easy to use website templates plugin. Its compatible with popular page builder plugins like Elementor and Beaver Builder and the Gutenberg Block Editor.
It offers access to 230+ free and premium website templates.
There are several free and premium restaurant and recipe website templates to choose from. For this guide, were going to select a premium template to build our food blog website.
There are free food templates too, which well highlight in a little while.
These advanced templates come with all the essential features that a food blog or recipe website should have.
Lets install and activate the premium version of Stater Templates called Astra Premium Sites.
Once youve purchased the Astra Premium Sites, you will get the plugin ZIP file and a license key with the confirmation email.
Navigate to the Plugins > Add New area.
Click on the Upload Plugin button.
Choose the plugin ZIP file and hit the Install Now button.
After completing plugin installation, click the Activate button.
Well next need to activate the plugins license key to be able to use it.
Go to the Plugins > Installed Plugins area.
Find the Premium Starter Templates and click the License link.
Paste the license key into the input field of the popup modal.
Finally, hit the Activate License button to activate the plugin.
You should see a success message.
Note:
If you get an error message, youll need to contact our support team who will be happy to help.
One more step to go.
Recommended Reading: Margarita Recipe For A Gallon
How To Start A Food Blog In Just 8 Simple Steps
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Want to start a food blog but unsure how to begin? With over 600 million blogs online today, many of which host recipe and food inspiration, the idea may be pretty daunting at first. But dont worry were here to help you get started!
Whether youd like to get creative with blogging as a hobby or grow it into something large-scale, here are eight simple steps on how to make a food blog from scratch from how to find your niche, to how to create unique content and promote your blog.
Finding your niche is an essential first step to creating your online food blog. By discovering where theres a gap online, youll compete with fewer blogs, and appeal to your audience more efficiently. Remember, friendly competition is often inevitable, but you still want to stand out.
So, where to begin? Youll have noticed that peoples food interests are always changing, which means finding a niche is achievable. Ask yourself what can you bring to the table? Whether you want to explore how-to guides, specific cuisines, or eco-friendly cooking, its important to figure out what youre passionate about, so you dont lose interest, and continue to enjoy blogging.
Here are some tips to help you find your niche:
Once youve established your brand identity, its time to select your domain name.
How To Create It
There are many stages, from the idea of creating a cooking website to its launch. One of them is the choice of a suitable platform. Before you make a cooking website, you should decide on its requirements:
- what your target audience is
- whether you sell the dishes cooked by yourself, organize a site with recipes or create a forum
- whether each user will be able to post recipes
- what the general appearance and functionality of the cooking website will be, etc.
These and many other questions are essential to think about in advance. One of the most convenient and easy to use engines is MotoCMS visual builder . It is a perfect match for creating a cutting-edge cooking website. Among the main advantages of this editor, one can distinguish the presence of many implemented tools, open-source, and a huge number of ready-made cooking website templates.
Recommended Reading: Lose Belly Fat Drink Recipe
Making Money With Food Blogging
Once you build up some traffic to your food blog, and these AdSense alternatives are probably one of the easiest and most reliable mechanisms for earning money. A great WordPress plugin to help implement this is Ad-Inserter. Ad-Inserter allows you to create ad blocks just about anywhere on your site, A/B test things, rotate between different options, and so on.
Amazon native shopping ads can also be a big win when it comes to making money with a food blog. These ads scan the content of your site, then display similar products on Amazon. Since Amazon converts so well , this can be a killer combination when implemented along with AdSense.
If you want to link directly to an Amazon product, consider . This creates an easy GUI to quickly add any product you want from Amazon to your WordPress posts, pages, and sidebar.
Finding a good affiliate in the food space and focusing on ways you can drive traffic to them can be a nice source of additional income. An example? Freshly, a meal-delivery service. Sign up for their affiliate program, throw up some banners in high-attention areas on your site, and take note of the situations where you drive the most sign-ups.
If you dont like the affiliate method, you could also charge for ad placement on your site. Third-party platforms like Gourmet Ads or BuySellAds make it easy to sell advertising space on your food blog.
Phase : Take It To The Next Level
Your food blogging business is booming: you have a big following, a lengthy email list, maybe even a cookbook or two. But youre still looking for whats next. There are a couple of other things you can do to keep your business growing, like selling branded kitchenwares, like tools, aprons, or even table settings. If theres a particular food item youd like to develop, such as a marinara sauce youd like to bottle and sell, you can go that route, too.
Also Check: Recipes Using Cinnamon Toast Crunch Cereal
Things To Do Before You Hit Publish
Its your first article, so chances are, it wont be perfect. We all miss little things like the odd comma or tiny spelling error. So, before you hit publish on that first article, check the following:
As you continue to work on your content, all of this will become second nature.
Install WordPress Recipe Plugin
In order to get up and running with your recipe website, you need to install and activate the Recipe Maker For Your Food Blog plugin. You can do this from your WordPress admin dashboard.
Once the WordPress recipe plugin has been installed and activated, you can start to look around. You should immediately notice two new options on the left-hand admin panel, Recipes and Zip Recipes.
Unfortunately, these options are similarly named and are quite different from each other.
The Recipes option is how you will actually add recipes into the plugin.
The Zip Recipes option is where you will find all of the settings for the plugin.
Read Also: Intermittent Fasting Recipes For Weight Loss
Update I Currently Make Around 45
However, since growing, my expense has now increased since I have also hired an FT employee to support me with my admin tasks that way I am able to spend more time creating content and working on my blog.
Every month is different but now 50% of my income comes from my website ads! which is why I HIGHLY recommend starting a blog.
Finding Inspiration From These Recipe Blogs
There are so many great recipe blogs here, along with thousands of recipes across them all! Bookmark this page or 1-5 of these healthy food blogs that sound most exciting to you. Then choose either once a week or once a month to try a new recipe! This will help keep it simple while also giving you time to explore and find new foods, flavors, and recipes you love!
You May Like: Weight Loss Chicken And Rice Recipes
Collaborations With Other Food Bloggers And Influencers
If you want to gain exposure in your niche, the best thing to do would be to collaborate with others in your industry. Established food bloggers and influencers can help you to expand your reach and attract a wider audience.
If you dont want to collaborate with your direct competitors, you can at least look for people who are as closely connected with your niche as you feel comfortable. If youre an all-vegan food blogger, for example, you could work with a vegan food blogger who specializes in pastries, lets say.
Reach out to different influencers and see which collaboration would make sense for your blog and brand persona.
How To Start A Food Blog: Step By Step
Want to start a food blog but dont know where to start? I know how frustrating it can be to deal with technical stuff when you really just want to share that killer recipe. Whether you want to start a cooking blog, or you want to become a more successful food blogger, I hope these tips will ease your technical troubles.
Ready to start a beautiful food blog? You have two options:
Also Check: Vegetarian Salad Recipes With Protein
Food Blog Website Template
Creating a food blog and sharing visitors with useful information on recipes or tips on places to shop, restaurants to go is an excellent opportunity to turn your hobby into a source of income. With a websites fast loading speed and user-friendly interface, youll gain the audiences trust, get to the top of blogs and ensure a good user experience.
Besides adding the content, youll be able to change the position of posts, categories, tags, overall design and functionality, so that youll tailor the website to your wishes. Also, there are social media integration buttons for people to learn about you from various platforms. And a new benefit of our food blog is Instagram integration, which means that the posts are visible on the website on the right.
It is not easy to stand out, but if you manage to find your style and unique ways of presenting the material, youll make a profit in the short term. Before starting your blog, make sure youve considered the following questions:
- Can I take tasty photos?
- Can I write compelling and interesting texts?
- Do I understand what my target audience is?
- Do I know anything about marketing strategies and web design?
- Am I open and creative?
- Am I ready to devote a lot of my time to blogging and gaining new knowledge and skills?
These questions describe what skills and knowledge you should have. Nevertheless, even if you answered No to most of them, its never too late to learn something new.