Plugins, tools, and tech, oh my! There are so many plugins and tools available to food bloggers these days — it can be overwhelming trying to navigate which ones you need, which ones are “nice to have,” and which ones to avoid.
Our sister site, Pinch of Yum, has been in the food blogging game for a long time (over 13 years now!) and has been through lots of trial and error with which plugins and tools they use on their site.
And that’s why we’re here to share Pinch of Yum’s favorite plugins and tools with you today! These are the tried-and-true resources they use on their site (we use and love many of them on Food Blogger Pro, too). We’re talking image optimization, nutrition labels, roundup posts, site security, and more!
WP Tasty Plugins
WP Tasty was a TinyBit brand (that’s our parent company!) for a few years before we sold it to Strategy11 last year. That said, Pinch of Yum still uses all four of the WP Tasty plugins.
Tasty Recipes ($49/year) is a WordPress plugin that simplifies the process of writing and formatting recipes on your blog (pretty necessary for a food blog!). Recipe plugins provide structured data that helps optimize your recipes for SEO (search engine optimization) and helps readers find your recipes on search engines (like Google and Pinterest). Tasty Recipes offers six customizable recipe cards, recipe scaling, unit conversion options, and more.
If you want to learn more about choosing the best recipe plugin for you, check out this article!
Tasty Roundups ($49/year) is a plugin that makes it easy to curate well-designed collections of recipes using your existing content (like this 10 Cozy Casserole Recipes roundup post). Built-in search functionality automatically pulls recipe titles, images, and links right into the roundup post. Easy peasy!
The Tasty Pins ($29/year) plugin optimizes your images for sharing on Pinterest. With Tasty Pins you can set a Pinterest description to your images, add a Pinterest hover button to your images, add Pinterest-specific images to your website front-end, or disable pinning on any blog images that you don’t want to share on Pinterest.
Last, but not least, in the WP Tasty family is Tasty Links ($49/year). Tasty Links allows you to automatically link keywords in posts to URLs of your choosing. You can use Tasty Links to share affiliate links, link to evergreen content on your blog, or link to other content you write about often.
Nutrifox ($9/month, $89/year)
Nutrifox is a tool that makes it easy to create, customize, and embed nutrition labels into your recipe posts. Luckily it works in tandem with Tasty Recipes! All you have to do is input your recipe ingredients, copy and paste in a simple code into the recipe card, and tada — you have a recipe card with a nutrition label! You can also customize which nutrients are displayed in your nutrition labels, if you’d rather not display calories, for example.
Yoast SEO (Free version, $99/year for Premium)
The Yoast SEO plugin helps you optimize your recipe posts. The free version of the plugin provides reminders about the most important SEO aspects of blog posts and has handy tools that can help you optimize your posts for SEO. The premium version of the plugin has even more features (like a user-friendly redirect manager and an internal linking tool).
Want to learn more about SEO?Akismet ($5/month)
Akismet is a spam filtering plugin (and just happens to be the most popular anti-spam plugin). Akismet protects against comment spam, form submission spam, forum bot spam, and any other type of user-submitted text spam and saves you the time (and frustration) of manually filtering these things yourself.
Cloudflare (Free – $20/month)
Cloudflare is a content delivery network that helps keep your site secure from any malicious activity. It also optimizes loading times on your site, which is a win for SEO.
Pretty Links ($100/year)
Pinch of Yum uses the Pretty Links plugin to make a long, ugly link into a… pretty link. Relatively straightforward, really! This plugin helps you make custom links, optimize links, and automatically add affiliate links to your site. It simplifies links for social media, email newsletters, and redirects.
Public Post Preview
Public Post Preview is a plugin that lets you share a link to users to preview a draft of a post before it is published. This makes it really easy for someone to proofread a post or to share with a brand if a post is part of a partnership so that they can check out the post before we hit publish.
Ninja Forms ($49/year)
When someone fills out the contact form on Pinch of Yum, they use Ninja Forms to reply with an automated response. This plugin makes things super simple and lets the user know they’ll be hearing back from the team ASAP.
Slickstream (currently on waitlist)
Pinch of Yum uses the Slickstream plugin to help readers search for, discover, and engage with Pinch of Yum content. You’ll see little heart icons in the bottom corner of the screen, the filmstrip of recipes across the top of the page, and embedded Instagram stories into posts. Pinch of Yum also uses Slickstream for site search!
Jetpack ($5-$25/month)
The Jetpack plugin helps keep Pinch of Yum safe and secure and lets readers have a great experience through faster load times. And now Jetpack has a Security plan that provides comprehensive WordPress site security including VaultPress and Akismet for a nice all-in-one situation for $10/month.
VaultPress ($5/month)
Pinch of Yum has over 1000 posts and pages (and counting!). Can you imagine if they lost all of those posts? That’s where VaultPress comes in handy. VaultPress is a backup plugin that helps recover and restore any losses if needed.
Of course, these aren’t the only tools and plugins that food bloggers should be using; they’re just the ones that are working for Pinch of Yum at the moment! You can check out our 6 essential food blog plugins blog post for more information on the types of plugins we recommend for all bloggers, and if you join the Food Blogger Pro community, you can learn how to use some of our favorites in easy-to-follow lesson videos and courses.
We’re curious… what plugins do you use and love on your site? We’re all ears!