A plain, step-by-step guide to starting a food blog on WordPress, from picking a name and hosting to publishing your first tested recipes.
New to Scrumptious?
Learning how to start a food blog is easier than it looks. You need a name, a home for your site, a few good tools and a habit of publishing. You don’t need to code, and you don’t need to know everything on day one. This guide walks you through the setup in plain steps, so you can spend your time where it counts: in the kitchen and at the keyboard.
It’s written by the team behind Scrumptious. Nate, who built it, is a former chef who now builds WordPress sites for a living, so the advice here comes from both sides: the kitchen and the WordPress dashboard.
Before you buy anything, decide what your blog is about. “Food” is too wide. “Weeknight dinners for two”, “gluten-free baking” or “the food of my home region” gives readers a reason to come back, and gives you a clear list of recipes to write.
Keep it short, easy to spell and easy to say out loud. Check that the domain (yourname.com) is free, and that the name is free on Pinterest and Instagram too. Avoid names that lock you into one dish if you think you’ll branch out later.
Your domain is your address. Hosting is the computer that serves your site to readers. Most hosts sell both, and many include the domain free for the first year.
When you compare hosts, look for:
Cheap shared hosting is fine to start. You can move to something bigger once traffic grows.
WordPress runs a huge share of the web, and most serious food blogs use it. There are two versions, and the difference matters:
For a food blog, self-hosted WordPress.org is the usual choice, because the tools food bloggers rely on (recipe cards, SEO, email signups) are plugins. Your host’s one-click installer will set it up for you.
Your theme controls how the site looks. A good food blog theme is:
Don’t spend weeks on this. Pick a clean theme, set your logo and colors, and move on. You can change it later without losing your posts.
Plugins add features to WordPress. Start with a short list and add more only when you need them. Too many plugins slow a site down.
This is the big one. A recipe card plugin puts your ingredients, steps, times and servings in a tidy box, adds a print button, and adds the recipe data Google uses for recipe results. Without it, Google can’t easily tell your post is a recipe.
Scrumptious is our free recipe card plugin on WordPress.org, and it leads with ease: paste your recipe the way you wrote it, and the ingredients, steps, times and servings fill in for you. No forms, and it uses your theme’s fonts so the card matches your site. Readers get servings scaling, US/metric, cook mode and a print view. See installing Scrumptious and your first recipe to get going.
Rank Math, Yoast and similar plugins help you set page titles and descriptions, create a sitemap, and connect to Google Search Console. Pick one, not two.
If your host already backs up your site, you may not need another backup plugin. Do turn on automatic updates for plugins you trust, and use a strong password with two-factor login.
Your email list is the one audience no algorithm can take away. Add a simple signup form now, even if only five people join this year.
Before you launch, add a few basic pages:
Aim to launch with five to ten recipes, not one. It gives new readers something to explore and shows Google what your site is about.
Writing recipes that work in someone else’s kitchen is a skill. Our guide on writing recipes like a professional kitchen covers ingredient order, exact amounts, visual cues and testing.
Chef’s note: cook every recipe from your own written version before you publish it. Follow it exactly, as if you’d never made the dish.
If you already have recipes in a notebook or a doc, Paste & Parse turns them into recipe cards without retyping each field.
You don’t need a fancy camera to start. A recent phone does a good job if the light is right.
Use the finished dish as the main recipe image. Google can show it in recipe results.
New blogs take time to show up in search. You can help it along:
Consistency beats bursts. One good recipe a week, every week, will grow a blog further than ten in a month and then nothing. Pick a pace you can keep for a year.
Share each new post where your readers already are. Pinterest is a strong fit for recipes. Food-blogger groups can help with questions and feedback, as long as you follow each group’s rules.
That’s it. Starting a food blog is mostly about getting the basics in place once, then cooking, writing and publishing. The tools should get out of your way so you can do the part you love.
