Savvy Blog Talk: Making Your Recipes Printable

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If your readers want to make one of your recipes, don’t make them run back and forth from the kitchen to their computer or risk getting food spills on their tablet or smartphone. Instead, make your recipes easily printable.

If you are self-hosted on WordPress.org:

If your site is self-hosted on WordPress.org, there is a slew of plug-ins or services that will make your recipes printable. These three are the best that I’ve found and tried:

1. Print This Section.

This is the simplest and most basic way to make your recipes printable. Simply install the plugin, then go into your post editor page. Highlight the recipe and click on the little printer button in the toolbar (the same bar where you can make the font bold, underlined, etc), and your readers will see a “Print This Section” button next to your recipe. Bonus: this plug-in can make any text printable. You aren’t limited to just recipes…try making your workouts, tutorials and informational posts printable as well.

PROS: Simple to install and use. Easy to go back and make all past recipes printable. Can be used for any text, not just recipes.

CONS: Does not code the recipes with rich snippets or schema.org (both of which help your recipes show up in Google recipe searches) for you. Does not create a recipe page or index for you.

2. RECIpagePRO.

This program sets up a sortable, searchable recipe page directly on your blog so that your readers can browse your recipes by cuisine, cooking method, course, key ingredient and other categories. On the RECIpage home page, users can browse recipes from all participating bloggers.When they find a recipe they are interested in, they must click back over to the original post to see the full ingredients and instructions, giving you more visibility and traffic back to your recipes.

PROS: Creates a sortable, searchable recipe page on your blog. All recipes show up on RECIpage home page alongside other blogger recipes, but require users to click over to your site to see the full recipe.

CONS: When users click from the RECIpage home page over to your recipes, they are directed to just the recipe, not the full blog post.

3. ZipList.

ZipList is the recipe service I personally use. It does the coding to help your recipes show up in Google searches for you. Your recipes will also appear on ZipList’s website alongside recipes from other bloggers and major recipe sites such as Epicurious and Martha Stewart, but anyone who wants to make your recipe will need to click over to your site to see the full details… a win-win. The other bonus of ZipList: you can fully customize the look of your recipes. The only downside? If you want a sortable recipe page on your own site, you’ll have to put one together yourself.

PROS: Formats your recipes according to schema.org ‘s guidelines so that they show up in Google recipe searches. All recipes show up on ZipList alongside recipes from other bloggers and major food sites, but require users to click over to your site to see the full recipe. Allows readers to save your recipes to their recipe box and generate a shopping list on the ZipList site.

CONS: Does not create a recipe index or page for your site.

If you are on free WordPress.com, Blogger, Tumblr or another blogging platform:

If you aren’t self-hosted on WordPress, your printable recipe options are a little more limited. You essentially have two options, as far as I can tell:

1. RECIpage has a version that works with free WordPress.com, while RECIpagePRO works with Blogger. At this time, no version of RECIpage is compatible with Tumblr.

2. Google Sites. The Food Blog Alliance outlines this process far better than I could, so check it out if you are on free WordPress.com, Blogger, Tumblr, or any other blogging platform.

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