It’s true that the work of a food blogger tends to get overwhelming to the point where I start getting convinced that it’s not the work of only one person. I mean creating content {well, that’s the meat!}, creating the perfect backdrop, taking the pictures either step-by-step or of the finished masterpiece, phew! No easy feat!! Thank heavens for the god-send developers who have curated these plugins which makes the life of bloggers like me and you, easier.
I mean, was not creating content, scheduling and uploading enough work? Now you are telling me I would have to think about it being visibly engaging, fret about how a follower would get in touch with me or would know about my upcoming endeavor. Add to that the art of dodging the panic attacks about a potential malware or spam hitting the blog and having headaches over missing a delivery deadline. Or be incredibly upset about the blog site getting bogged down by the pixel heavy {read: awesome} pictures.
Listen we do not have time for any of these! So we would entrust this job safely into the hands of the coders who have toiled hard and come up with these plugins which could be sneaked into our website. The plugins essentially help the functionality of the blog. How? By offering to run features, which otherwise would have been not easy for us to come up with.
Food blogger tribe, I’m sure you would agree with me when I list these plugins as absolutely essential for the heightened success of our blogs.
WP Recipe Maker/ Tasty Recipes/ Zip Recipes
What is a food blogger doing after all? Writing recipes and creating content related to food and gorging, right? So if the recipe is what brings in the traffic and helps you earn your bucks, it would not be too much to ask you to install a plugin that would beautify, format, and optimize the blog for a better search ranking. When you install a recipe plugin, you get to add images, a step-by-step video, serving size, prep time and many other rich snippets. And all these snippets are visible when a user searches for a relevant recipe.
What’s even better, most of these plugins come with a print button, so now your audience could build their own recipe book by printing out from your blog. Zip Recipes also offers a ‘Pin it’ button, so your recipe is going places for sure {I meant to Pinterest!}.
So upping the ante for your SEO game, making the recipe look flamboyant with pretty presentation and formatting, and easy share buttons, these recipe plugins are the ‘Best Actor’ in your whole blogging film!
Mailchimp/ Bloom
Would you want returning visitors? Of course, yes! And you would also want them to know about you a little bit more, keep yourself in their top recall by letting them know what great thing you are on to next. If you answered yes to all of these, Mailchimp or Bloom could be your next best friend. Instead of you going on with embedding different forms into your content, delegate the job to these plugins.
Mailchimp would come up with different forms that the user could fill in and this information could come in very handy when you are looking for preferences of your target audience. These forms usually come up as a pop-up, or at the end of your recipe content or come floating in the middle of the screen. Mailchimp or Bloom or similar plugins is the best possible way to get your weekly newsletter to your audience.
Akismet/ VaultPress
Rome was not built in a day! Same goes for your website, it took hours of perseverance, nudging the creative wires, penning those thoughts down, and finally the presentation. So we cannot simply let a nasty spiteful malware ruin everything. Agree, right?
So here comes in VaultPress, our ‘Best Supporting Cast’ which would take backups of our work at designated intervals or you could synchronize it with the dates when you put up new content. VaultPress would conduct scans of your site looking out for incredulous activities and keep sending you emails with reports or you could access updates via your dashboard.
Akismet scans the comments and interactions on your website to filter out those spams by updating the comment filters. Keeping your blog universe squeaky clean!
Editorial Calendar/ Nelio Content
Why do you need an editorial register kind-of-a thing? Because it’s the office set-up for all bloggers. It’s here that you would see the date when your next content goes live and helps to quickly access the drafts. A great calendar would help in the ideation process, and help manage work of the contributors and would quietly do its part in posting the content on Pinterest or Instagram.
The Editorial Calendar plugin offers you all that we just spoke about. The drag and drop option is great when you are looking to move content around, the Draft Drawer helps to manage the work-in-progress and easy viewing of tasks gives an insight into their statuses.
The Nelio Content plugin is a game-changer. Why? It simply eases out your social media posting anxiety. Like the other calendars, it does all those work and adds the work of scheduling posts designed for the social media platforms to that list as well. Imagine this, you would have all your posts scheduled to go live on your website and the social media forums of your choosing at the same time, automatically. Phew, that takes a lot of stress out!
WP Rocket/ WP Super Cache
As a blogger what would be your CTA? Mine is a recipe save, share or print or a click on the affiliate link. And all of these are only possible when the visitor stays on my website and a fast loading website is one of the great ways to keep the visitor engaged longer and bounce rates lower.
With food blogging, the drool-worthy images drive the visits. But these images tend to slow down the website. With a caching plugin like WP Rocket or WP Super Cache, a few aspects {like your blog logo, your profile snippet} are stored on the user’s cache folder like a repository. So when they visit your page again, the session would be spared off the loading time of these elements because they are already existing in their iPad or computer.
These caching plugins absolutely justify their names, don’t they? Superstars of our food blogs!! Don’t hesitate to put in those Canon DSLR 50mm lens food photographs on your next recipe blog now!!
Yoast/ Feast Plugin
So Yoast basically does the reality check for you. Yes really! Yoast SEO plugin would suggest keywords and would ensure their appropriate usage throughout the content by way of page analysis. It checks the density of the keywords, properly using the long-tail keywords, title tags, meta description, the main heading for SEO compatibility. All this would only help in climbing up the Google search ranking ladder. You were already creating super awesome content, now by using this SEO plugin make it your super crowd-puller as well.
I have been hearing great reviews about the Feast plugin. It’s great for SEO, optimizes the page loading speed, has one-click updates, and comes with amazing themes. Check it out the FAQs here, if you want!
Food blogging is such a dynamic universe and there’s something new to add to our blog everyday! It just dawned on me that a Easy Social Share Buttons plugin would be of great help or maybe a Pin It Button {Pinterest drives a lot of audience for food blogs}. Or maybe a plugin like WP Smush which automatically compresses the pixel heavy food photos to your set dimensions, so your site is not bogged down. Everest Form plugin is also the one you could think about when you are about to create that Contact Me page or any other interaction form.
The last word of wisdom, when shopping for food blog plugins, always double-check the reviews, the tech support, how frequently they are updated, and whether it has all the data entry fields available {especially important for recipe plugins}. Now that you are armed with the best plugins, go conquer the world; food bloggers world I meant!
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