Essential WordPress plugins for your food blog
What makes wordpress so powerful is it’s flexibility. Basically WordPress allows you build up your food blog brick-by-brick to make it faster, safer and functional.
So after you have set up your food blog, read more about starting a food blog here, you can start to add some plugins.
Wordpress itself allows you to make pages, write posts and manage your website. Plugins are “bricks” so to say that that add more functionality.
Alright let’s get to the plugins!
Contact Form 7 (free)
Contact form 7 is a wordpress plugin that allows you to build a contact form on your food blog. If you want your visitors to be able to contact you by email this plugin does that very good.
You can build your own contact form and decide wether you want them to add there (full)name, website, e-mailaddress, subject and text. You can even let them add attachments if you like.
When you’ve created a contactform, a shortcode is created which you can add to any page or post on your blog.
See the plugin here
Easy Recipe (free / premium)
Easy Recipe is the plugin I use to add recipes to my posts. It’s easy and clear. The free plugin does what it needs to do, so I recommend using the free plugin when you’re just starting out.
The premium version adds more customization options and costs $24,95.
See the plugin here
WP Super Cache (free)
Wat does a caching plugin do? Basically it creates an image of your website and serves that to visitors, instead of serving the more heavy loading files.
By doing this your website becomes waaaay faster and the functionality will still be the same. The reason to add this plugin is because no one wants to wait for a page to load more than 2 seconds, so by speeding up your website you’ll getmore visitors to view your pages.
Setting up this plugin can be quite discouraging, so here’s a simple step by step setup guide from wpbeginner.com
See the plugin here
All In One WP Security & Firewall (free)
Do you want your freshly new food blog which you’re so proud of to be hacked by some crook behind a computer somewhere in the world….nope. So make sure your security is up to date.
This plugin features a rating system showing you how well protected your website is from its dashboard. Making it very easy to set it up. I am using this plugin to secure my blog and it’s working perfect.
Make sure to set up the login lockdown, brute force, firewall and to block spam bots under spam prevention.
See the plugin here
MailChimp (premium) or Mailpoet Newsletters (free)
These plugins (mailchimp is not really a plugin) let you make e-mail lists of people that subscribed to your blog.
By placing a widget for example in your sidebar where people can subscribe to your blog, their email adress is listed in this service.
These services let you create newsletters that you can send to your subscribers manually or automacilly when you post a new recipe.
See mailchimp here
See Mailpoet here
These are 5 wordpress plugins that I consider essential for starting out with your blog. If you know any more essential wordpress plugins, I’d love to know! Tell me yours in the comments below!
Comments (2)
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Hi Niels,
Great list, those are definitely essential for most (food) blogs. I was wondering if you’ve tried WP Ultimate Recipe before as alternative to Easy Recipe? I’m the one who created it and any feedback from food bloggers like yourself is welcome!
Kind regards,
Brecht-
Author
Hi Brecht,
Thanks for the update, I didn’t know about your plugin. I’ll definitely check it out.
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