Starting a food blog is a great way to share your passion for cooking and baking with the world. Whether you’re a professional chef or a home cook, a well-designed WordPress website can help you reach a wider audience and showcase your recipes in an attractive and organized manner. 

With so many WordPress themes available, it can be challenging to find the right one for your food blog. However, you don’t need to spend a lot of money on a premium theme to get started. In fact, choosing a free or inexpensive theme is a smart move, as it gives you more budget for other must-have plugins that will add core features to your food blog.

In this article, we share the 7 best free food themes for WordPress, so you can easily pick the right one for your site and start sharing your recipes with the world. So, without further ado, let’s dive in and discover the best free food themes for WordPress in 2023!

Why is It Important to Have a WordPress Food Theme?

As a food blogger, it’s essential to have a website that showcases your recipes in a visually appealing and functional manner. While you can use a multipurpose theme for your food blog, it might require a lot of customization and design tweaking to make it suitable for your needs. 

Using a dedicated WordPress food theme can make things much easier for you and help you get your website up and running faster.

Let’s take a look at some of the key elements of a great WordPress food theme.

Clean Page Layouts 

A WordPress food theme is designed specifically for food bloggers, and it comes with page layouts and features that are essential for this niche. It will include a range of blog post layouts that let you share your recipes in a way that’s easy to read and navigate. 

In addition to sharing recipes, you will need to create other pages on your website too, so you’ll want a theme that has templates that account for this. For example, you might want to create a Contact Me page or an About the Author page where you can write your food blog introduction.  

It is also good to have category templates that showcase your recipes in a grid format, along with the featured image for each recipe article. This can help readers navigate through various cuisines and food types with ease.

Ability to Display High-Quality Images in an Attractive Manner

As a food blogger, you’ll need to showcase your recipes with high-quality images, and a food theme should make it easy to do so. Most food themes support both desktop and mobile image layouts, as well as video display formats. 

While selecting a theme, make sure it supports all standard photo dimensions and has various templates that can best display the color, texture, and making of your unique dishes. It is also essential to have a responsive theme as mobile devices generate 59.16 percent of global online traffic.

A clean and minimalist design lets your recipes be the highlight of the site. Besides, if you are interested in monetizing your food blog, you can use the grid space to easily display ads from platforms like Google AdSense or Mediavine.

7 Best Free Food Blogging Themes

There are 450+ free food blogging themes on WordPress. Some have a minimalist and professional look; some have a unique and creative style; while others feel homey and inviting. The best food theme for your WordPress site will depend on the type of recipes you will be sharing and the kind of personal brand you want to build.

We have shortlisted seven free themes that have all the key features required for a smart and intuitive food blog. With their responsive designs, custom widgets, and easy customization options, these themes make it easy to create a beautiful and functional food blog on WordPress. 

The best part? They are compatible with all major recipe plugins as well!

1. Kale

The Kale WordPress food blog theme has many layouts for your blog posts

Kale is an aesthetic, uncluttered theme that is designed primarily for food bloggers. It is SEO-friendly and integrates well with WooCommerce, enabling you to convert your passive food blogging activity into a full-fledged business. 

Here are some of the key features of the Kale theme:

  • Clean, beautifully designed layouts with two blog archive page templates (grid format and mixed format)
Kale grid layout
Kale mixed format layout
  • Ability to add a custom text or image logo for personal branding
  • Responsive and mobile-friendly layouts with customizable sidebar options and automatically responsive YouTube videos
  • WooCommerce integration which allows you to sell affiliate/branded products, like food equipment, ingredients, cookbooks, and other merchandise
  • MailPoet integration which enables you to send regular emails to subscribers about new recipes, offers, or tips on your blog
  • Setting up social media sharing icons on all pages is quick and easy
  • The theme includes support for full-width posts and pages
  • Compatible with RTL content display

2. GuCherry Blog

The GuCherry blog theme comes with attractive banner options that you can import

GuCherry is a modern, interactive food blog theme that has clean layouts and a fully responsive design. Developed by Everest Themes, it has one-click demo imports with attractive banner/slider options. Here’s why you may want to consider GuCherry for your food blogging website:

  • It is optimized for fast speeds and easy discoverability by search engines
  • It has cross-browser compatibility, which ensures that it looks good on any browser and device
  • It features an in-built social widget that helps you connect with your social handles and improves social sharing opportunities
  • It is translation-ready and has RTL support
  • It offers lazy-load functionality which can reduce page load time

3. Elara

Elara is a multipurpose blogging theme with fantastic food blog layouts

Elara is technically a multi-purpose blogging theme, but it has some great layouts for food bloggers, so we have included it here on the list. Its best feature is a special Home page that offers multiple sidebar placement options. In addition, it has some other great features such as:

  • In-built social media icon display options, with deep Instagram feed integration. This lets your readers share recipes and images on their social handles using popular hashtags such as #foodgram
  • Support for Contact Form 7 and WP Forms Lite, which enables you to set up a dynamic contact form on your website
  • Excellent customer support and a helpful community that can resolve your queries in no time
  • The option to hide the banner or image slider completely
  • Options for full-width pages, posts, and categories
  • Video compatibility, complete with a fully responsive video display

4. OceanWP

The OceanWP Theme has a free template called Maria that’s a good fit for food bloggers

OceanWP is a lightweight, highly customizable multi-purpose theme that has powerful features and compatibility with most of the popular WordPress plugins. Want to sell products through your food blog? Looking to establish yourself as a chef? Or perhaps set up a food blogging channel? You can do it all and more, with OceanWP. Here is a brief overview of its features:

  • 12+ ready-to-use food and restaurant templates, with a variety of page layouts and color profiles, all downloadable with one-click import options
  • The theme is device-responsive and translation-ready
  • Compatible with major page builders like Elementor, Brizy, Beaver Builder, Divi, Visual Composer, and SiteOrigin
  • Fast and responsive customer support 
  • Advanced customization options for developers

Although a lot of the food blogging templates are premium, their Maria template is free. One point in OceanWP’s favor is that it has 700,000+ active installations on WordPress.org and over 5,000+ 5-star reviews, which makes it worth considering.

5. Food Recipe Blog

The Food Recipe blog theme features a big banner where you can showcase your latest recipe

True to its name, the Food Recipe Blog theme focuses more on the recipes than the authors. If you are someone who wants your delicious recipes to be front and center, this minimal theme can be a good option. Some of its features include:

  • Retina-ready displays suitable for all professionals in the food industry – restaurants, bakeries, food delivery services, food magazines, home cooks, dieticians, cooking experts, food bloggers, and more
  • SEO-friendly and responsive layouts
  • Comprehensive documentation, which gives you all the information you need to customize it per your requirements
  • Optimization for fast page load speeds, to reduce page load time
  • A huge image banner on the homepage that’s great for directing your readers to new recipes or even your store if you have one
  • Endless color customization options so that you can easily customize your site to match your ideal branding
  • Great blogging templates, including layouts to recommend related recipes

6. Foodielicious Blog

The Foodelicious Blog Theme has lots of advertising space 

Foodielicious Blog is designed by SuperbThemes to help food bloggers easily monetize their websites with a lot of advertising space for running affiliate programs. For example, you could set up an affiliate marketing program with your local grocery stores that have an online presence and display their products on your recipe pages. This way, you get a commission every time someone purchases a product from the store through your link.

Some of the other features of the Foodielicious Blog theme are:

  • Optimization for SEO and high conversion rates
  • Lightweight code that does down your website
  • The ability to set up custom logos and favicons
  • Compatibility with WooCommerce
  • Custom menu options that are translation-ready

It is important to note that Foodielicious Blog is a child theme of the Customizable Blogily theme, so it may not be as frequently updated as the main theme itself.

7. Bakery Cafe

The Bakery Cafe theme is a free theme that’s adaptable to food blogging

While Bakery Cafe is technically designed for bakery shops, it displays recipe posts beautifully and can be a great fit for any food blogger. Here are some of the reasons why Bakery Cafe can be a good free food blog theme option:

  • It has a live customizer where you can change colors, logo, headers, blog layouts, and more.
  • It is fully responsive and has mobile-friendly layouts
  • The theme features clean, customizable code that does not affect site speed
  • It is compatible with the Elementor page builder
  • It features standard and custom shortcodes that you can use to create dedicated sections showcasing your food expertise and business value
  • Intuitive admin interface that makes it easy to discover and use all of the theme’s functionalities

That covers our list of the best free food blogging themes for WordPress. However, you will need more than just a theme to ensure that your blog stands out from the crowd.

Is a WordPress Theme All I Need to Start My Food Blog?

A WordPress theme is crucial for creating the visual design and aesthetic of your food blog. However, to fully utilize the functionality of your website, you also need additional plugins to enhance the site.

One such core plugin for food bloggers is WP Recipe Maker. This plugin allows you to create attractive recipe cards that can be displayed in your recipe posts. With a wide range of templates to choose from, you can easily find one that fits your brand and style. You can also customize your template using the Template Editor.

WP Recipe Maker provides several features that make it an excellent choice for food bloggers.

  • You can add step-by-step instruction images or videos to your recipe cards to help your readers to follow the recipe more easily and understand the process better.
Adding images and videos to instructions with WP Recipe Maker
  • Make your recipe cards as helpful as possible by including essential information about prep time and cooking time, calories per serving, number of servings, and more. Additionally, you can add taxonomies to your recipe cards. The free version of the plugin includes courses and cuisines as recipe taxonomies, but you can create as many new ones as you like with WP Recipe Maker Premium. This example shows a recipe card where ‘Difficulty’ has been added as a taxonomy to help readers decide whether they should make the recipe based on their skill level:
Add recipe taxonomies to your recipes to give your readers more information about the dish.
  • You can also add other, useful information such as ingredient images and equipment images, and set them as affiliate links, giving you the potential to monetize your recipes.
Adding equipment images to recipe cards with WP Recipe Maker
Adding equipment images to recipe cards with WP Recipe Maker
Adding ingredient images to recipe cards with WP Recipe Maker
Adding ingredient images to recipe cards with WP Recipe Maker

The plugin also helps to improve the customer experience in various ways. For example, readers can print recipes, save their favorite recipes in recipe collections, and adjust serving sizes directly from your website. These features make it easier for your readers to interact with your content and use your recipes.

WP Recipe Maker also provides features that help you display your recipes better across your site, such as taxonomy archive pages and recipe roundups. With these features, you can create a more organized and user-friendly recipe section for your food blog.

While a WordPress theme is essential for the design of your food blog, a plugin such as WP Recipe Maker is crucial for providing the functionality and features necessary to make your site user-friendly and effective for your audience.

Start Your Food Blog With a WordPress Food Theme and WP Recipe Maker

Starting a food blog with WordPress is easier with the use of a good food blog theme. The theme provides the foundation for your website’s aesthetic and design, making it look professional and well-suited for your purpose. 

While there are many free themes available, they alone may not have all the functionality you require. That’s why we highly recommend that you pair your food blog theme with the WP Recipe Maker plugin, which offers the best solution for displaying recipes on WordPress. 

With many templates to choose from, step-by-step instructions, precise nutritional information, and various other features, it will help you enhance the user experience and potentially monetize your recipes. If you’re looking to start a food blog, try out WP Recipe Maker and see the difference it can make today!

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