How to Start a Food Blog – Easy Guide for Beginners

This article goes into detail on how to start a food blog. You will want to set up your basic blog before reading this article. For the basics on how to create a new blog of any kind (including a food blog), check out my free blogging tutorial first, then come back to this article later.

If you have a passion for cooking or discovering new food places, food blogging can become a fun and beneficial way to be part of an active community of others who share the same passion. hobby with you. If you have some good writing skills, there’s no reason you can’t succeed in this increasingly popular field, especially if you’re focused on a specific niche and carefully targeted audience. .

Just like many other popular fields, such as travel or fashion, food is a broad subject and with the right approach and well-constructed planning you will be able to find a speak on its own and fill the void in the market. Food blogging is more than just posting recipes: other content, such as restaurant reviews, tips and tricks, shopping guides, and even purely visual content can be found. See placement on a successful blog.

Why start a food blog?

There are many pros and cons to starting a food blog, but with the right approach, many of the cons can also be counted as pros. Since everyone’s preferences vary widely when it comes to food, you’ll eventually face both praise and criticism by more or less equal measures, but it’s a social topic. high that people like to talk about. Most importantly, blogging about food is the perfect complement to your interests, as it pushes you to experiment more in the kitchen and increase your knowledge on the subject. You’ll get ideas and inspiration during your research and through the comments your readers leave on posts. Once your blog is widely known, you can even have businesses offer you a free meal in exchange for an article. Plus, you can even use your website as a base to write cookbooks or take advantage of other opportunities like writing newspapers or magazines.

Who should publish a food blog?

Some people are great writers and others are good chefs or foodies, but you don’t have to be either to have a successful food blog. What is needed is a genuine passion in your hobby that will keep you cooking and sharing your experiences with your readers. For a broader reach, you can often combine food with another niche, such as travel or lifestyle, to narrow your focus.

In terms of the more technical aspects, such as registering a web address and setting up WordPress, starting a food blog is like starting any other blog. However, unlike some nooks and crannies, food is particularly intuitive in nature. If you’re going to show off your own recipes and ideas, then you really need to hone your photography skills, as you won’t be able to simply get images from anywhere else on the Web. . You also need to clearly define your target audience and be wary of deviating from the established plan. Finally, and most importantly, you need to keep cooking so your readers have fresh content on a regular basis.

How to Start Your Food Blog

Once you’ve decided on a specific topic to blog about, you’ll be ready to register your domain name and purchase a hosting plan. To help maximize your visibility in search engines, make sure to choose a short and relevant domain name that people will have no trouble remembering. A great domain name for your food blog should be creative as well as descriptive. See Step #1 in my guide for more information on how to find a good blog name.

Having a self-hosted WordPress site is by far the best option for starting a blog. Powering about a fifth of all websites, WordPress is the most popular and user-friendly publishing platform for bloggers. It has many themes and plugins and is completely free thanks to its open source nature. To make things easier, many major hosting companies, such as Bluehost, offer one-click WordPress hosting whereby your blog goes live as soon as you register your domain and choose your hosting plan.

A self-hosted WordPress blog offers many advantages including great customization options. In fact, WordPress is used not only for blogs but also for e-commerce stores, online portals, static websites, etc. Being open source and regularly updated, WordPress websites also have tend to work well in search engines. You can further enhance the platform’s search engine optimization (SEO) capabilities by installing Yoast’s free WordPress SEO plugin. Just be sure to keep the platform and any themes and plugins you use up to date. You will receive a notification in your admin console whenever a new update is available.

Recommended Themes for your Food Blog

Once you’ve got WordPress up and running, you’ll be ready to start customizing your site and publishing content, but before you begin, you’ll want to improve your site’s user experience and give it a web a different look by choosing the perfect theme. There are literally thousands of themes available, including some premium ones. The large number of options can make it difficult to find the right theme, so experiment a bit. Most importantly, always stick with responsive themes that automatically scale to different screen sizes so your blog stays user-friendly and easy to read on all Internet-enabled devices. If you’re having trouble finding a suitable theme for your food blog, check out the following for inspiration:

Food blog

One of the few premium themes specially designed for food bloggers, the appropriately named ‘Food Blog’ theme is fully responsive and built using the latest HTML5 technology. It also comes with the Recipe Card plugin, which can be of great help when optimizing for food related keywords.

Publication

While this free WordPress theme is suitable for many lifestyle related areas, the large header it offers makes it great for food bloggers looking for a magazine-style design. has an eye-catching header image. Highly intuitively oriented, it also features a convenient responsive design.

Foodeez Lite

Although designed with restaurants, hotels and other similar venues in mind, the highly intuitive nature of Foodeez Lite also makes it a great choice for a food blog, especially those pages related to photo slideshows and other visual content. It shows full width header images and thumbnail previews for posts.

I cook

With plenty of white space to help display your recipe posts and photos, this premium theme features a filterable recipe library and sidebar widget to automatically display the most popular recipes. your. It is also widely customizable and responsive.

Zylyz

A free theme designed specifically for food bloggers, Zylyz is a great choice for any recipe website. You can display a large image of your featured recipes in the slideshow header, and it allows you to create custom post types, taxonomies, and meta box data.

Recommended plugins for your food blog

Plugins can enhance the functionality of your blog in many ways. While there are a few plugins that every blog should have, such as WordPress SEO, XML Sitemaps, and W3 Total Cache, there are a few others that are particularly well-suited to food blogs:

WP’s Ultimate Formula

The aptly named WP Ultimate Recipe is one of the most popular free plugins for food bloggers. It provides everything you need to attach recipes to posts, and by using shortcodes you can embed multiple recipes in the same post. You can also add ingredients, courses, and dish types to your card cloud widget.

Pinterest Pin Button for Images

This small and simple plugin provides essential functionality to your blog in the form of a Pin button on your images. Instead of just relying on social share buttons at the bottom of posts, this plugin allows your visitors to share images on Pinterest simply by clicking on them.

Next Generation Gallery

As a visually demanding theme, any plugin that enhances the images and the way they are displayed can be very useful for a food blog. Nextgen Gallery is a powerful tool for uploading and managing your image collections and displaying them as slideshows or thumbnails to go with your posts.

Unit converter

A successful food blog often targets a global audience, so it’s important to provide both metrics and measurements in units of measure. This plugin automatically detects the units of measure written in your posts and it will automatically convert them when readers hover over them.

Promote Your Blog

Starting your food blog is only the first part of the battle. You will have to focus on providing regular quality content to your readers as well as promoting your blog. Becoming a master of visual social media sites, such as Instagram and Pinterest, is especially important at this point, and you’ll need to maintain an active presence on both of these to bring best chance of success. Check out Step #6 in my guide for more information on how to promote your blog.