Starting a food blog is exciting, but there are plenty of practical decisions to make to get the ball rolling. If you publish recipes on WordPress, choosing the right recipe plugin is one of them.
WP Recipe Maker and Cooked both help you create structured, reader-friendly recipe cards, and both support valid recipe schema. WP Recipe Maker is the better fit for food bloggers who want full control over their recipe cards, with affiliate links and nutrition tools to add as the blog grows.
So the decision is about which plugin best supports how you want to grow – from recipe SEO to monetization and customization. Ask yourself:
- Do you want to monetize recipes with affiliate links?
- Will readers be able to submit their own recipes?
- What features make sense for your budget?
Once you’ve answered those questions, choosing between WP Recipe Maker and Cooked becomes much easier.
WP Recipe Maker vs Cooked at a glance
WP Recipe Maker has 50,000+ active installations on WordPress, compared with 3,000+ for Cooked. But popularity alone doesn’t tell you which plugin will work better for your blog.
Here’s how their key features compare, including what you get for free and what requires a paid plan.
| Feature | WP Recipe Maker | Cooked |
| Recipe schema | Yes: Free | Yes: Free |
| Nutrition | Yes: Premium for a nutrition label you fill in; Pro for automatic calculation | Limited: Free for manual nutrition; Pro for automatic nutrition |
| Timers | Yes: Premium | Yes: Free |
| Adjustable servings | Yes: Premium | Yes: Free |
| Ingredient/equipment affiliate links | Yes: Premium | No |
| User recipe submissions | Yes: Elite | Yes: Pro |
| Recipe card customization | Full: Template Editor available in Free, with additional customization options in paid versions | Limited: Shortcode-based templates; extra layouts in Pro |
| Starting price | Free; paid plans from $49/year | Free; Pro from $49/year |
WP Recipe Maker puts its free version into recipe card design and schema, while timers and adjustable servings, which Cooked gives away free, come with Premium. From there, Premium, Pro and Elite add affiliate links, nutrition calculation and user submissions, none of which Cooked offers free.
| If you’re still comparing your options, our guide to the best WordPress plugins for food blogs looks at recipe plugins alongside other useful tools for running a food blog. |
How recipe schema affects your search results
Recipe schema, or recipe structured data, is information added to a page that helps Google understand that the content is a recipe and identify details such as its ingredients, cooking time, nutrition, images, and ratings.
Adding valid recipe structured data can make your recipes eligible for recipe rich results in Google Search. These can present recipe information more prominently in search results, although using schema doesn’t guarantee that Google will display a rich result or improve your rankings.
Importantly, both plugins support valid recipe schema. That means either can give Google the structured data it needs to understand your recipes, but neither can guarantee higher rankings or rich results.
WP Recipe Maker has been handling recipe SEO for a long time. WP Recipe Maker generates Recipe, How-To and ItemList schema as JSON-LD, and updates it as Google’s requirements change. WP Recipe Maker’s free plugin also runs a built-in SEO check on every recipe card, flagging missing or recommended metadata so you can fix it without reading the schema markup yourself.
Cooked also supports recipe structured data and has continued updating its implementation over time. WP Recipe Maker gives you more control over recipe SEO than Cooked, because its free SEO check flags missing schema fields on every recipe card.
| If you’re seeing errors or wondering why your recipes aren’t appearing as expected, our guide to WordPress recipe schema and fixing recipe rich snippets explains what to check. |
How much does each plugin cost?
Both WP Recipe Maker and Cooked have free versions, with paid plans available when you need more features. One important point to clear up is that Cooked Pro isn’t a one-time purchase. Like WP Recipe Maker, continued access to updates and support requires an annual renewal.
WP Recipe Maker has three paid tiers, and each one is sold for 1 site, 2 sites, 3 sites, or up to 20 sites:
| Sites | Premium | Pro | Elite |
| 1 site | $49/year | $99/year | $149/year |
| 2 sites | $89/year | $179/year | $269/year |
| 3 sites | $129/year | $259/year | $379/year |
| Up to 20 sites | $199/year | $399/year | $599/year |
Cooked Pro has one feature set, priced by the number of sites:
- 1 site: $49/year
- 3 sites: $99/year
- 5 sites: $149/year
- 20 sites: $399/year
That makes the entry price identical at $49 per year for one site, but the two plugins price differently. With WP Recipe Maker, you choose the features you need first, then the number of sites. With Cooked Pro, every license has the same features and you pay for more sites.
What the free versions include
If you’re starting out, you may not need a paid plugin straight away. Both WP Recipe Maker and Cooked offer free versions that cover the essentials.
WP Recipe Maker Free covers automatic recipe schema and the Template Editor for designing your recipe cards. Cooked’s free version adds manual nutrition, timers and a servings switcher. Add the affiliate links, adjustable servings and nutrition tools in the paid tiers, and WP Recipe Maker is the stronger base for a growing food blog.
For lots of bloggers, the reason to upgrade will be a specific feature they can’t get for free. WP Recipe Maker Premium adds adjustable servings, a kitchen timer, a nutrition label you fill in yourself, and other reader-focused features, while automatic nutrition calculation is available with Pro and user recipe submissions with Elite. Cooked Pro adds features including front-end recipe submissions and automatic nutrition calculation. For the full breakdown, see WP Recipe Maker Free vs Premium.
| If you’re setting up your first food blog and aren’t sure which features you’ll actually use, our guide to choosing a WordPress recipe plugin can help you narrow down what matters before you pay for anything. |
Monetizing recipes with affiliate links
WP Recipe Maker Premium lets you set an affiliate link for an ingredient or piece of equipment once and reuse it in every recipe, a feature Cooked doesn’t offer.
With WP Recipe Maker Premium, you can add affiliate links to ingredients and equipment used in your recipes. This could mean linking a particular brand of flour in the ingredients list, for example, or the stand mixer, baking dish, or thermometer you recommend. That means you don’t have to manage every link recipe by recipe. If you need to change a link later, you update it once rather than hunting through old posts.
If affiliate income isn’t part of your plan yet, this may matter less today. But if product recommendations already bring in income, or you plan to add them, having those links built into your recipe workflow can save a considerable amount of manual work as your blog grows.
Community recipes and user submissions
If you want readers to contribute their own recipes, both WP Recipe Maker and Cooked can support user submissions.
Cooked Pro is the cheaper route if submissions are the only community feature you need, since they come with its $49/year single-site plan.
WP Recipe Maker Elite ($149/year) pairs user submissions with Recipe Collections, meal planning and shopping lists. Readers can submit a recipe, save others to a collection and turn them into a shopping list on the same site. That makes WP Recipe Maker the stronger long-term choice for community-driven food blogs.
Switching from Cooked to WP Recipe Maker
Already have dozens, or even hundreds, of recipes in Cooked? The thought of moving them all manually may be enough to put you off switching plugins. Fortunately, WP Recipe Maker has a built-in importer for Cooked.
WP Recipe Maker automatically detects your existing Cooked recipes and lets you import them rather than rebuilding each recipe from scratch. Your recipe data and metadata are transferred into WP Recipe Maker, which can then generate the appropriate recipe schema.
You shouldn’t need to change the URLs of the WordPress posts containing your recipes either. Keeping those URLs in place means you’re changing the recipe plugin rather than moving the content to entirely new pages. Once the new schema is live, Google can recrawl those pages and reassess them for recipe rich results.
It’s still worth checking your recipes after an import, particularly if you’ve used custom fields or set up Cooked in a less typical way. Some details may need tidying up manually, so test the migration and review the imported recipes before removing anything from your existing setup.
If you’re still on the older Classic Cooked plugin from CodeCanyon, move to the current free Cooked plugin first, because WP Recipe Maker’s importer reads recipes from that version.
That makes trying WP Recipe Maker a low-risk decision: your recipes stay in your existing WordPress posts, and you keep a route back because Cooked can also import WP Recipe Maker recipes.
So, which plugin fits your blog?
WP Recipe Maker is the better choice for food bloggers who want to grow, with a Template Editor in the free version, affiliate links from Premium and nutrition calculation from Pro.
Of course, we’re a little biased. We built WP Recipe Maker because we wanted food bloggers to have more control over their recipes, from how their recipe cards look to how they handle SEO, monetization, and the reader experience. If you’re building a food blog with growth in mind, WP Recipe Maker is the plugin we’d recommend.
Where Cooked Pro packages front-end submissions into its $49 license, WP Recipe Maker is built around everything else that grows a food blog: recipe SEO, affiliate monetization, and a Template Editor that makes your recipe cards your own. Premium starts at $49/year with a 30-day money-back guarantee, so you can try it on your own blog without risk.
We’re proud of what we’ve built, but you don’t have to take our word for it. Have a look through the full WP Recipe Maker feature list, compare it with what you actually need, and decide whether it’s the right fit for your blog!
Frequently asked questions
Does Cooked slow down your site?
Neither plugin should noticeably slow down your site, because both WP Recipe Maker and Cooked load their recipe assets only on pages that need them.
That said, any WordPress plugin can add some overhead. Your actual page speed will also depend on your theme, hosting, images, caching, and other plugins, so it’s worth testing your recipe pages after installing either option.
Can you customize the recipe card design?
Yes, both plugins let you customize your recipe cards, but WP Recipe Maker gives you more control over their design.
Cooked builds its recipe layouts with shortcodes, and Cooked Pro adds extra layouts such as Modern Grid, Full-Width and Compact. WP Recipe Maker has a dedicated Template Editor, which lets you customize the layout and appearance of your recipe cards to fit your site’s branding.
If recipe card design is a priority, WP Recipe Maker’s deeper customization options are an important difference between the two.
Which plugin is easier for beginners?
Both are beginner-friendly, and WP Recipe Maker works out of the box: you can publish your first recipe card on a ready-made template without configuring anything. Its extra settings and customization options are there when you want them, so you can explore them as your blog grows instead of switching plugins later.
Do either plugin add nutrition facts automatically?
Both plugins can calculate nutrition facts from your ingredient list, but only in their paid versions.
Cooked Free lets you display nutrition information that you enter manually, while automatic nutrition calculation is available with Cooked Pro.
WP Recipe Maker Premium includes a nutrition label that you fill in yourself. WP Recipe Maker Pro adds nutrition calculation. Click Calculate Nutrition Facts in a recipe, and WP Recipe Maker matches each ingredient to the Spoonacular nutrition API, which Bootstrapped Ventures pays for. You check the matches, fix any that look off, and confirm the values, so each recipe takes a quick review rather than typing in every number. There’s no bulk calculation across all recipes, because checking each match keeps your nutrition facts accurate.
How often is WP Recipe Maker updated?
Both plugins are actively maintained. WP Recipe Maker ships an update every two to four weeks, with new features, improvements, compatibility changes, and fixes. You can see its current release history in the WP Recipe Maker changelog.