How To Create A Recipe Website 2024

Teach Mate is a reader supported website. If you purchase using a link on this site, we may earn an affiliate commission. This doesn’t cost you anything.

So you’ve got it in your mind that you want to make a cooking or recipe website. But how hard is that going to be? Luckily for you, not very! In fact, it’s possible to set up a high quality recipe website quite quickly by following the below guide. So read on to get your own mouthwatering cooking site set up within the hour (or much less).

How To Make Your Recipe Site In 11 Minutes Step By Step

We can get your site up ready to add your recipes in around 11 minutes. It’s very easy, so let’s cook it up:

  1. Go to Justhost as we need a place to host your website.
  2. You’ll see a special offer; click ‘Get Started Now’.
  3. Select the ‘Basic’ plan; unless you want to create multiple sites.
  4. Here the fun starts; pick your website name, e.g. CookingWithMe.com then select ‘Next’.
  5. Fill in your information. When you sign up for at least 12 months you get a big discount, but if you sign for 36 months you save the most. Once filled in, click the Submit button.
  6. Once you’ve joined & are logged into Justhost, click ‘Install WordPress’.
  7. Follow the step-by-step instructions that come up, but don’t choose to install the recommended themes or plugins.
  8. Lastly, let’s enable privacy for your website. Via JustHost go to: Domains > Manage > Security > select ‘Domain Privacy’.

There you have it; a new website for your recipes and cooking, and it only took you a few minutes.

If you haven’t yet, follow the above instructions step by step. Once your recipe site is set-up we can start adding some tasty features. 🙂

What Are Readers Of Recipe Sites Looking For?

Before you build your website, you need to have a think of what your audience will be looking for. This will allow you to create something which will be well received and highly shared.

First of all, it’s important to note that many people who visit recipe sites aren’t there to find something to cook. Some just like looking at nice pictures of food, while others come for the inspiration for ways to adapt their own recipes. Due to this, you should ensure your site includes nice pictures which are interesting and shareable.

Of course, a lot of people will also come for the recipes because they want to try your version of a certain meal, and will follow your instructions step by step.

Lastly, many of your visitors will want a way to collect and save your recipes. Thankfully, the plugins I list below make it easy for your readers to do that. 🙂

What Kind Of Pages Should A Recipe Website Have?

Ok, time to get started with building your recipe blog out. First of all, what kind of pages do you need to add? Well, the obvious one is recipe pages! This will be the core of your business.

Other than that, you’ll want to have category pages which separate the type of meals you share, so people can easily find what they’re looking for. For example, you may have a category which has breakfast recipes, another category with ‘main meals’, one with ‘desserts’, one ‘vegetarian’, and the like.

You’ll want to include an ‘about’ page so people can find out all about your site, and why they should take note of you over all the other sites out there.

Those are the base pages you should have, I’ll give more page suggestions as this guide goes on.

2 Plugins For Recipe Websites

Plugins are software add-ons which can be added easily to make your site have more features. While there are a lot of different plugins out there, here are two which are particularly useful for recipe based websites:

  1. Easy Recipe allows you to easily add recipes to your site which people can then go on to print and share. The good thing about this is you can simply enter the details in a easy to follow form, and once you hit publish it’s available to add to your website. A top plugin.
  2. Ziplist is another plugin many recipe websites tend to use. Ziplist is an alternative to Easy Recipe, although it pretty much does the same thing. They claim that their plugin makes it more likely the image of your recipe appears in search engine results, so if this is important to you, you may want to give it a try.

Be sure to also add social sharing buttons on your website to encourage shares. There are plenty of plugins which allow you to do that.

Additional Features Your Recipe Site Could Have

As I briefly mentioned, it’s important you make your recipes easy to save, as people like to collect them. The above plugins I mentioned both come with a easy saving feature.

Another feature you can add are coupons. As people will need to buy food to make what you share, why not see if you can offer them coupons for money off these foods?

Lastly, another good idea is to give guides on cooking techniques so they can better carry out your recipes.

There are a lot of other features you could add; thinking outside the box will allow you to come up with a few.

3 Other Epic Food Sites To Draw Inspiration From

Here are some recipe sites you might want to get ideas from:

  1. Simply Recipes is a personal website which has taken off and receives millions of views a month. The inspiring thing is it’s made on WordPress using the method I’ve shown you above, and it’s run by an individual rather than a big company. In other words, you can replicate Elise’s success!
  2. Unlike Simply Recipes, Food.com is run by a bigger company and has almost half a million recipes on there to search from. That said, you can still draw inspiration from them, and see which are the things you want to apply to your own website.
  3. Foodie With Family is another idea of a personal recipe blog that was made on WordPress which is doing well. This one gives a more personal feel than the other two, as it incorporates some humor and talk of the family.

You don’t have to stick to making sites like the above, but hopefully they give you some ideas of what you can potentially do when building your website.

Ways To Drive Traffic To Your Cooking Site

Ok, so you’ve set up a mouth watering food website, and you’re ready to launch. But wait, where is your traffic going to come from? Read this guide to find out how to start getting people to your new recipe website.

Similar Posts