WP Recipe Maker is a strong fit for food bloggers who want an SEO-friendly recipe plugin they can customize and keep using as their site grows. It gives you a lot of control, and that’s very much intentional.
There are plenty of reviews of it out there, but as the team that builds it, we thought it was worth writing one ourselves. WP Recipe Maker is our full-time job: we update it every two to four weeks, and the people who build it are the ones who answer your support questions.
In this review, we’ll go into the features, recipe SEO, ratings, pricing, and the differences between plans. We’ll also honestly cover the less-glamorous stuff: what takes a little time to learn and where you’ll need a paid plan.
What WP Recipe Maker does and who it fits
WP Recipe Maker is a WordPress plugin for adding recipe cards to your posts and pages. You add your ingredients, instructions, cooking times, images, and other recipe details, and WP Recipe Maker turns that information into a structured recipe card for your readers. It also handles the recipe structured data that search engines need to understand your content.
It’s used on 50,000+ WordPress sites and has a 4.9/5 rating, so it’s certainly not a newcomer. It is one of the best WordPress recipe plugins available on the market today.
WP Recipe Maker works with Gutenberg, the Classic Editor, Elementor, and Divi out of the box. And you don’t need to be particularly technical to get your first recipe published. You can choose a template, add your recipe, and leave most of the more advanced settings alone until you need them. Support comes straight from the team that builds WP Recipe Maker, and every question is answered within 24 hours, often much faster.
Where WP Recipe Maker really outdoes itself is when you want more from your recipe cards. Depending on your plan, readers can adjust serving sizes, convert units, leave ratings, use Cook Mode while following a recipe, and more. You can also get much more particular about how your cards look and behave.
That amount of choice does mean there’s more to explore than you’ll find in some simpler recipe plugins. You absolutely don’t need to learn or configure everything at once, though. The basics are straightforward; the extra depth is there for when your blog needs it.
For larger recipe sites, that becomes particularly useful. Recipe Collections, available with Elite, lets readers save and organize recipes and use them for meal planning and shopping lists. So you’re not forced to rethink your recipe setup simply because your site, or what you want to offer your readers, has grown.
WP Recipe Maker pros and cons
WP Recipe Maker is the recipe plugin for food bloggers who want full control over their recipe cards, with recipe schema built in on every plan.
| Pros | Cons |
| SEO-friendly recipe schema built in automatically | So much to explore in the Template Editor you could spend an afternoon just browsing options |
| Deep customization via the Template Editor, including an AI Assistant | Automatic nutrition calculation sits at Pro rather than Premium, so it’s a small step up rather than day-one included |
| Scales from Free to Elite without switching plugins | If you want a truly bare-bones plugin with zero decisions to make, this gives you more than you might need |
| Built-in importers from Tasty Recipes, WP Delicious, and Create by Mediavine | – |
| Recipe Collections for meal planning and shopping lists on larger sites | – |
Is WP Recipe Maker hard to use?
WP Recipe Maker probably isn’t for you if your main priority is having as few options as possible. There are 60+ premium features, plus a full Template Editor, so there’s quite a bit you can configure.
The important word there is can. You don’t need to work through every setting before publishing your first recipe. Start with what you need, then explore the more advanced options as your blog grows.
That depth is a deliberate trade-off. A simpler plugin may feel quicker to get your head around on day one, but WP Recipe Maker gives you much more room to change your recipe cards, fine-tune your SEO setup, and add functionality later without having to move to another plugin.
So if you want something extremely stripped back, WP Recipe Maker may be more than you need. If you’d rather have that extra control available when you’re ready for it, the initial bit of exploring is likely worth it.
How WP Recipe Maker gets your recipes into Google results
WP Recipe Maker helps with recipe SEO by automatically adding the structured data Google needs to understand your recipes and make them eligible for recipe rich results.
That last part is important. WP Recipe Maker can give Google the right information, but no recipe plugin can guarantee that Google will show a rich result.
When you fill out a WP Recipe Maker recipe card, information such as the ingredients, cooking time, servings, nutrition, images, and ratings can be turned into recipe structured data. This is added in the background, so you don’t need to write JSON-LD or understand schema markup yourself. WP Recipe Maker outputs Recipe, How-To, and ItemList schema, and runs a built-in SEO check on every recipe card.
This matters because a normal blog post makes perfect sense to a person reading it, but search engines benefit from a more structured description of what’s on the page. Recipe schema essentially tells Google, this is a recipe, these are the ingredients, this is how long it takes, and these are the instructions.
That structured information can make your recipes eligible for richer appearances in Google Search, including recipe-specific results. WP Recipe Maker also supports review snippet structured data, allowing eligible recipe ratings to appear alongside search results.
You still need to do the rest of your SEO work, of course. A recipe card won’t make up for unhelpful content, poor photography, or a site that’s difficult to use. But it does take care of an important technical piece that would otherwise be surprisingly easy to get wrong.
| Want to know more about this? Check out our food blog SEO guide to get you started! |
Customizing recipe cards without touching code
You can customize WP Recipe Maker recipe cards without knowing how to code. In fact, customization is one of the areas where we’ve deliberately given you a lot of control.
The Template Editor, included in the free version, lets you take an existing recipe card template and make it fit your site. You can change colors and fonts, move sections around, adjust labels and icons, choose which elements appear, and change the overall layout. Once you’re happy with a template, those changes can be used across your recipes rather than styling every card individually.
And you can take this as far as you want. If all you need is to change a few colors to match your branding, great. If you’re a developer who wants to get into the HTML and CSS, you can do that too.
Elite users can also try the Template Editor AI Assistant. Instead of hunting through the editor for a particular change, you describe what you’d like to adjust, and the assistant proposes the change for you to review before you apply it.
This is one of the clearer differences between WP Recipe Maker and a plugin like WP Tasty, where you pick from a small set of preset card designs, adjust colors and buttons in the settings, and need custom CSS or PHP for anything deeper. WP Recipe Maker is the better choice for anyone who wants real control, because the Template Editor lets you reshape the recipe card into a proper part of your site without writing code.
That philosophy carries into Recipe Collections, too: an Elite feature no other major recipe plugin offers. Rather than only changing how an individual recipe looks, WP Recipe Maker gives you options for how readers can save, organize, shop for, and interact with recipes across your site.
How reader ratings work and stay compliant
WP Recipe Maker lets readers rate your recipes, while giving you control over how those ratings are collected and displayed.
One thing we take seriously here is keeping WP Recipe Maker in line with Google’s guidance around ratings and review structured data. That guidance changes over time, which is why we actively develop the plugin rather than treating recipe schema as something we can set up once and forget about.
WP Recipe Maker changed how ratings could be submitted after concerns around the integrity of anonymous, one-click star ratings. It now requires a comment, name, and email alongside every rating, whether readers leave it in the comment form or through the User Ratings modal. That gives each rating some actual context, rather than simply collecting anonymous star clicks.
That distinction is worth making because ratings aren’t just there to make a recipe card look good. They can also feed into the review structured data associated with your recipe, so it matters that they represent genuine reader feedback.
You don’t need a paid plan just to start collecting feedback, either. Comment ratings are available in the free version of WP Recipe Maker, while Premium adds in-card star ratings, so readers can rate a recipe without leaving the recipe card.
| If you want to get more thoughtful about encouraging genuine feedback, we’ve covered that separately in our recipe ratings guide. |
Moving recipes over from another plugin
You can import recipes from other recipe plugins into WP Recipe Maker without manually rebuilding every recipe.
This matters a lot more when you have 300 recipes than when you have three. Switching plugins is already a big enough decision without adding weeks of copying ingredients and instructions to the job.
WP Recipe Maker has built-in importers for 11+ recipe plugins, including Tasty Recipes, WP Delicious, and Create. The importer converts the existing recipe data into WP Recipe Maker recipes, rather than simply turning your old cards into blocks of plain text. That means important recipe information stays structured so WP Recipe Maker can use it for the recipe card and its metadata.
You don’t have to move everything in one go, either. A sensible approach is to back up your site and test the import with a small number of recipes first. If you have a staging site, even better. Check that ingredients, units, instructions, images, and other important fields have come across as expected before moving on to the rest of your library.
There may still be a little tidying up to do, particularly if your previous plugin stored or formatted recipe information differently. But for most bloggers, switching to WP Recipe Maker is a migration job rather than a start-from-scratch job.
What it costs and which tier suits you
WP Recipe Maker has a free version and three paid plans, so you can choose based on the features your blog needs. The paid plans are annual subscriptions that renew automatically. You can cancel anytime and keep using the version you have, upgrade later by paying the difference, and every paid plan comes with a 30-day money-back guarantee.
- Free at $0: Unlimited recipes, recipe structured data, the Template Editor, and comment ratings.
- Premium: $49/year: Adds adjustable servings, in-card user ratings, Cook Mode, ingredient and equipment affiliate links, and nutrition labels.
- Pro at $99/year: Adds automatic nutrition calculation, unit and temperature conversion, and custom recipe fields.
- Elite at $149/year: Adds Recipe Collections with meal planning and shopping lists, user recipe submissions, eCommerce products, and the AI Assistant.
There’s one distinction we want to make particularly clear: automatic nutrition calculation starts with Pro, not Premium. Premium lets you display nutrition information that you enter yourself. With Pro, WP Recipe Maker can help calculate nutrition data for you using an external nutrition API.
Which tier for your blog
If you’re just starting out, there’s nothing wrong with using Free while you get your blog off the ground. You can publish as many recipes as you like, and WP Recipe Maker will still handle the recipe structured data.
Premium is where many growing food bloggers will want to start. Adjustable servings and additional rating functionality make your recipes more useful and interactive for readers, while nutrition labels and other premium features give you more room to develop your recipe cards.
Choose Pro if features such as automatic nutrition calculation and unit conversion would save you meaningful time. If you regularly publish recipes for readers in different countries, for example, having visitors switch between US customary and metric units can be particularly useful.
And Elite is for bloggers who want to go beyond individual recipe cards. Recipe Collections lets readers save and organize recipes, plan meals, and create shopping lists, making it particularly interesting once you have a larger recipe library and want readers to do more with it.
How WP Recipe Maker helps you monetize
WP Recipe Maker supports monetization, including affiliate links within your recipes and shoppable ingredient integrations. What it can’t do is promise that those features will increase your income.
Affiliate links can be added to ingredients and equipment, which is handy if you regularly recommend the same products across multiple recipes. Instead of keeping track of those links separately in every post, you can manage them as part of your recipe setup.
WP Recipe Maker also integrates with shoppable-recipe services, including Instacart, Chicory, and Walmart, so readers can send a recipe’s ingredients to an online grocery cart. Instacart and Chicory can earn you commission, while the Walmart integration currently doesn’t offer revenue share.
SEO plays a slightly different role. The structured data WP Recipe Maker adds makes your recipes eligible for Google’s recipe rich results, which can give searchers more information about a recipe before they click. But we wouldn’t claim that rich results automatically increase click-through rates – or, in turn, your ad and affiliate revenue.
Plenty of other factors affect how much a food blog earns.
The plugin gives you tools to monetize the traffic you have and support the traffic you’re trying to grow. Your recipes, audience, SEO strategy, affiliate partners, and overall site still do the heavy lifting.
| For more on where those opportunities fit within the post itself, take a look at our recipe blog post template. |
See WP Recipe Maker in action
At this point, the easiest way to decide whether WP Recipe Maker feels right for your blog is to see it working. We can tell you everything we love about it, but it all comes down to how it works for you.
Our live demo lets you try the reader-facing side of WP Recipe Maker for yourself. You can explore different recipe cards, leave a rating, adjust servings, and see features such as Cook Mode in action rather than trying to picture them from a feature list.
You can also start with the free version of WP Recipe Maker and get a feel for the core recipe workflow before paying for anything. When you’re ready for features such as adjustable servings, more rating options, nutrition labels, or the more advanced tools in Pro and Elite, you can upgrade without starting over.
If WP Recipe Maker sounds like the right fit for your blog, take a look at the plans and find the one that works for you. We can’t wait to see what you create with us!