Tasty Recipes is a popular plugin for recipe SEO in the food blogging community, and for good reason.

It’s easy to use, well-supported, and a credible recipe card plugin option for WordPress from the team behind Food Blogger Pro, Tasty Pins, Tasty Links and Pinch of Yum. 

During our series of onboarding audits for Foodie Digital members, we catch a lot of mistakes with how Tasty Recipes is configured and used, which we share here for your benefit.

This post looks at Tasty Recipes’ most overlooked features, its newest features, and some of the plugin’s biggest recipe SEO benefits for food bloggers, including:

• Guided recipes (with video guidance)
• Recipe card design settings (new as of Nov 2020)
• 5 well-thought through extras
• Nofollow compliance
• Prep time, cook time, total time, yield fields
• Category, method, cuisine and keywords fields
• Diet metadata
• Video structured data

But first, some background on Tasty Recipes and why recipe schema mark-up matters.

Is the Tasty Roundups plugin the right fit for your food blog?

Learn more about the Tasty Roundups plugin, its SEO benefits, and the tool’s advantages if you already use Tasty Recipes.

WordPress recipe plugins are powerful SEO tools

A recipe card plugin is an essential recipe SEO tool for search engine optimization for food bloggers using WordPress. Using a recipe card plugin to automatically generate structured data, more specifically JSON-LD Schema Markup, unlocks a ton of opportunity for your recipe content. 

A few of the big wins are:

• Rich snippets for recipes, including star ratings and reviews
• Swipeable recipe carousels on mobile
• Featured snippets
• Eligibility for Google’s Assistant directory for Google Home 
• Google Home smart displays, and voice activated search
• Recipe badges in mobile image search results 

At Foodie Digital, we back three recipe card plugins for WordPress:

• Tasty Recipes by WP Tasty
• Create by Mediavine
• WP Recipe Maker by Bootstrapped Ventures

Why just three? Because not all recipe card plugins are created equal.

Let’s look at Tasty Recipes specifically.

Tasty Recipes, the WordPress recipe card plugin

Tasty Recipes, like Create by Mediavine and WP Recipe Maker, is a solid option for recipe schema mark-up for Google and Pinterest, including rich pins.

Of the three recipe card plugins we back, Tasty Recipes is the only recipe plugin without a free option. The fee for Tasty Recipes is $79 USD per year.

Unlike Create and WP Recipe Maker, which also support HowTo and ListItem schema in addition to Recipe schema, Tasty Recipes outputs Recipe schema only.

Is the Tasty Roundups plugin the right fit for your food blog?

Learn more about the Tasty Roundups plugin, its SEO benefits, and the tool’s advantages if you already use Tasty Recipes.

Here’s a look at the back-end of Tasty Recipes:

Google’s structured data guidelines

Google takes its Recipe, HowTo, and ListItem structured data guidelines seriously.

A manual action can be issued against your food blog if you mis-use or mix-up Recipe and HowTo schema—even if the mix-up is unintentional. Know when to use Recipe schema specifically and HowTo schema specifically, and then use that knowledge to your advantage.

If you use Tasty Recipes and create a good amount of non-recipe HowTo content, like:

• How to cut a butternut squash
• How to soak chickpeas
• How to cut and dice an onion
• How to cut and cube an avocado
• How to make zoodles
• How to stretch and fold sourdough

then it’s best to switch to a recipe card plugin like Create by Mediavine or WP Recipe Maker that also outputs HowTo schema.

Alternatively, you can disable the structured data for a non-human-edible recipe in Tasty Recipes under recipe options in the block editor. For example, if you use Tasty Recipes for dog treat recipes or DIY cleaning product recipes those shouldn’t include recipe structured data.

Guided recipes

Tasty Recipes allows you to create valid guided recipes for Google Assistant users. Guided recipes is not required for recipes to rank in Google’s search results. It’s only a suggestion.

What does a guided recipe look like in Tasty Recipes?

Here’s a guided recipes example from Pinch of Yum.

The image or video assets assigned to each instruction step add to a post’s existing recipe schema. You are not losing anything by not using guided recipes in your recipe cards.

That said, you do want to keep track of errors and warnings for guided recipes. The best way to do this is to use Google Search Console (a free tool) to find and fix guided recipes errors.

Here’s a helpful how-to video for formatting instructions in Tasty Recipes for guided recipes:

SEO tips for food bloggers prioritized

In this post we help you identify where you’re at with SEO, and then outline the actions you need to take to accomplish your SEO goals.

Recipe card design settings

With the release of Tasty Recipes 3.0 (new Nov 2020), you can customize the look of your recipe card and your social footer in Tasty Recipes’ new design settings.

In WordPress, navigate to Settings > Tasty Recipes and if you’re running Tasty Recipes 3.0 you’ll see the Design tab within the Tasty Recipes settings.

5 well-thought through extras in Tasty Recipes

Tasty Recipes is also:

• Mobile friendly
• Lightweight, and will not slow you down unnecessarily
• Block editor compatible (formerly known as Gutenberg)

The plugin also has a few well-thought through extras, including:

• Five theme options
• Tasty Links for adding equipment links
• The ability to add custom author name and a default link
• The ability to easily add quick links (i.e., jump to recipe)
• The ability to update a recipe without updating the post

Five theme options

By default Tasty Recipes includes five nice-looking theme options that range from colorful and bold to muted and minimal.

Tasty Links for adding equipment links 

Tasty Recipes’ core functionality can be expanded to allow affiliate links for equipment using the Tasty Links plugin (developed by the same team as Tasty Recipes).

The ability to add custom author name and a default link

In the plugin’s settings, you can add a custom author name, and an internal link to your about page so that this information shows up by default in each recipe card you publish.

The ability to add quick links

In settings, you can enable ‘jump to recipe’ and ‘print recipe’ quick links (how they display depends on your theme). The end goal is always to give the user what they want, and if that’s jumping to the recipe that’s a-okay. A happy reader is a reader who will return.

The ability to update a recipe without updating the post

Using the Quick Edit menu, you can quickly update a recipe without going into the post.

Tasty Recipes and nofollow

According to Federal Trade Commission and Competition Bureau of Canada regulations, if you:

• Create sponsored content for companies
• Use affiliate links (including Amazon affiliate links)
• Review free products

you’re required to apply a nofollow tag to external links that link back to the sponsor company’s website, products and social media accounts.

With Tasty Recipes you can add links to certain fields in the recipe card (such as description, ingredients and instructions). Links, including affiliate links, are added manually in the plugin’s freeform fields by clicking the link icon in the WYSIWYG.

Tasty Recipes uses the standard WordPress link editor, but adds in a nofollow checkbox globally, so that nofollow can be leveraged the same way in both the recipe card and post editor for compliance.

Pro Tip! With Tasty Recipes, if you use the classic editor, the nofollow checkbox shows up under the checkbox to open a link in a new window. If you use the block editor it’s a differently approach entirely, which we outline in this post about nofollow compliance for food blogs.

Prep time, cook time, total time, yield fields

Always enter minute information into the prep time, cook time and total time fields. Satisfying a user’s search intent is priority #1 for Google and time is paramount when it comes to cooking.

Don’t make searchers and site visitors dig for this information, including a recipe’s yield.

Consistently fill-in these fields so that searchers and site visitors know up-front the time it takes to prep and successfully make your recipe, and how many people it feeds.

Category, method, cuisine and keywords fields

Completeness is key when it comes to success with structured data so don’t skip these fields. 

In Tasty Recipes, the category, method, cuisine and keywords fields don’t include a dropdown list. You add your own terms by typing into each of the fields. Separate your terms with a comma.

What to put in the category field

A few examples of categories include: 

• Breakfast
• Lunch
• Dinner
• Dessert
• Snack
• Soup
• Salad
• Appetizer
• Beverage
• Side dish

What to put in the method field

A few examples of method include:

• Baked
• Sauté
• Grill
• Deep fried
• Poach
• One-pot
• One-pan
• Slow cooker
• Instant Pot
• No-bake

What to put in the cuisine field

A few examples of cuisine include:

• American
• Indian
• Pakistani
• Thai
• Italian
• Mexican
• French
• German
• Chinese
• Japanese

What to put in the keywords field

Use keywords that are helpful to a reader like specific ingredients they’ll need to have on hand to successfully make a recipe (i.e., coconut aminos, maple syrup, oregano, etc…). Or even specific cuts of meat (i.e., chicken breast, chicken thigh) or kitchen equipment that denotes cooking method (i.e., dutch oven, crockpot, instant pot, skillet, etc…). 

More examples of useful keywords to include in the keywords field are those related, but not limited to the season (i.e., winter, spring, summer, fall), holidays (i.e., Thanksgiving, Easter, Hanukah, Christmas) and special occasions (i.e., Halloween, Birthday, Valentine’s Day).

Diet metadata

Tasty Recipes users now have the ability to add Diet metadata (new as of March 10, 2020 using suitableForDiet metadata) to specify what type of dietary preference recipes are suitable for.

Diet metadata displays in the recipe card automatically by default. There is a fixed list of options to choose from, including vegan, vegetarian and gluten free and several more.

Video structured data

If you create recipe videos they can easily be added to Tasty Recipes recipe cards. This results in video structured data (such as description, duration, and uploadDate) getting included in the recipe schema output, which is a great thing for recipe SEO.

Tasty Recipes recognizes video in a post and automatically includes the video info in the structured data, even when a video’s URL isn’t added in the video URL field specifically.

Still, we always recommend including the URL in the recipe card video field specifically. This way, if you ever switch to a new recipe card plugin your video structured data will not be affected.

We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again: Don’t let learning the ins and outs of a new WordPress recipe plugin block you from achieving your food blog’s SEO goals.

Create, Tasty Recipes and WP Recipe Maker all offer importer tools that make switching recipe card plugins relatively straightforward.

Before making a change though, set aside time and compare and contrast the features of Create, Tasty Recipes and WP Recipe Maker, and decide which option is the right one for you now and in the years to come because the food blogging business is changing fast.

3 best WordPress recipe card plugins compared

Which WordPress recipe card plugin is right for you? In this comparison we look at Tasty Recipes, Create and WP Recipe Maker.

How to add a recipe in Tasty Recipes

Step by step, here’s how to add a recipe in Tasty Recipes, plus a few other pro tips too.

Yield: 1

How to add a recipe in Tasty Recipes

Prep Time: 15 minutes

Active Time: 10 minutes

Additional Time: 5 minutes

Total Time: 30 minutes

Difficulty: Beginner

Helpful, easy to follow instructions for food bloggers who want to learn how to use the WordPress recipe card plugin Tasty Recipes by WP Tasty to generate structured data for recipes. We draw special attention to easily overlooked features, and share a few of the SEO tool’s biggest benefits for food bloggers.

Print

Materials

• Your list of recipe ingredients
• Your recipe instructions
• Image assets ready
• Video asset(s) ready

Tools

• Tasty Recipes plugin ($79 USD per year)
• License key
• Internet access
• Your Wordpress website

Instructions

Purchase Tasty Recipes by WP Tasty

1. Visit wptasty.com and purchase the plugin
2. On the purchase confirmation page download the zip file (do not unzip the file!) and save it somewhere safe and convenient

Install Tasty Recipes

1. In WordPress, go to Plugins in the left hand menu. Click 'Add New'
2. Select 'Upload Plugin' and find the plugin's zipped file where you saved it
3. Choose the zipped file and click 'Upload Now'
4. Once you've successfully installed the plugin, click 'Activate'
5. To verify your license number, find your license number on your purchase confirmation page or email. Copy the license number
6. In WordPress, go to Plugins > Installed Plugins
7. Add your license number into the field at the top of the page, and click 'Save License Key'

Configure Tasty Recipes

1. In WordPress, go to Settings > Tasty Recipes
2. In Tasty Recipes > Settings (tab), choose your recipe card template; there are 5 options.
3. Select the quick links you'd like to display (i.e., jump to recipe and print recipe, or just jump to recipe on its own); add your instagram handle and hashtag, and your share a sale affiliate ID.
4. Also, in Tasty Recipes > Settings (tab) set your default author link (i.e., your about page). Including author name in your structured data with an internal link to your about page tells Google who you are and that you're the author of this recipe, which makes it easier to connect you with other online authority signals, such your instagram, Facebook and Pinterest profiles.
5. In the Tasty Recipes > Settings (tab) is where you'll also find Tasty Recipes' recipe converter tool
   
   
6. Pro tip! Do not immediately convert your recipes over from your previous plugin in bulk. Test the process first using 1-2 recipes to confirm that the process goes smoothly. Also, always back-up your food blog's database before switching between recipe card plugins
7. In Tasty Recipes > About (tab), scroll through the helpful documentation provided by the team behind Tasty Recipes.
8. Pro tip! Tasty Recipes' interface is very intuitive so if you're short on time, you can keep going but make a note to return to read the documentation so that you know the ins and outs of Tasty Recipes like the back of your hand

Step by step, how to add a recipe in Tasty Recipes

1. In WordPress, go to Posts > Add New
2. Click 'Add Recipe' button to create a new card for your recipe
3. In the Title field, add your recipe's keyword-optimized title
4. In the Author field, add your first and last name (not your food blog's or company name). Do not skip this field!
5. In the description field, write a short 150-word description of the recipe
6. Pro tip! Affiliate links can be manually added in all of the plugin's freeform fields. Click the link icon in the WYSIWYG bar to add a link; always tag affiliate or sponsored content links nofollow for compliance purposes
7. Copy and paste ingredients into the freeform ingredients field
8. Input your recipe's step-by-step instructions into the freeform instructions field
9. Add additional recipe notes to the dedicated notes field if needed; again, you can easily manually add a link in the notes field.
10. Fill in the recipe's total prep time in the field labeled 'Prep time'
11. Fill in the recipe's total cook time in the field labeled 'Cook time'
12. Fill in the total time it takes to make the recipe in the field 'Total time'; the default is prep time + cook time = total time
13. Fill in the recipe's total yield (i.e., 12, 24)
14. Fill in the recipe's category in the field labeled 'Category' (i.e., Breakfast, lunch, dinner, snack, appetizer, dessert, side dish, drink)
15. Fill in the recipe's method in the field labeled 'Method' (i.e., Oven-baked, stovetop, instant pot, slow cooker, on the grill, no-bake, etc...)
16. Fill in the recipe's cuisine type in the field labeled 'Cuisine' (i.e., Italian, Pakistani, Indian, Thai, Japanese, etc...)
17. Add keywords for the recipe in the field labeled 'Keywords' (i.e., vegan, vegetarian, quick, 30 minute meal, paleo, keto, summer, fall, winter, spring, etc...) Pro tip! Always separate keywords using commas.

Notes

The task of entering ingredients and instructions, plus keywords, cuisine, prep time, cook time and more into a recipe card plugin is admittedly a bit tedious but be thorough, it’ll pay off. Consistency is key when it comes to success with structured data and recipe SEO.