Do you consider yourself a “foodie”? Are you passionate about sharing your culinary creations and becoming the next celebrity chef or baking addict? If you’ve been thinking about starting a food blog but don’t know where to start, WordPress.com is here to help.
This post will cover all the ingredients you need to get started and set yourself up for long-term food blogging success.
A food blog is a broad category of websites focused on sharing food-related content. Some food blogs focus on creating original recipe content and offering their cooking know-how, others celebrate food aesthetics through high-quality food photography or catalog their food experiences by providing restaurant reviews or sharing culinary discoveries abroad.
The first step in creating a successful food blog is choosing a niche within the food blogging space. Choosing a clear niche ensures your content stands out and attracts website visitors who share your interests. By keeping your blog laser-focused, you can become a trusted expert and go-to resource on the web.
When it comes to finding the right niche, the menu is limitless. We’ve compiled a few ideas below to get you started.
- Cuisine: Focusing on your culture’s cuisine or cuisine you particularly love and have experience making can allow you to become an authoritative resource for culture-specific recipes and advice on sourcing specialty ingredients or brands.
- Lifestyle: Lifestyle choices can significantly impact how you cook and eat. Whether you are a van life enthusiast, an elite athlete, or a homesteader with kids, you can use the core elements of your lifestyle to build a unique brand that explains the how and why behind your food content.
- Geographic location: Whether you are writing local restaurant reviews or highlighting popular recipes from your region, a location focus provides specificity to your content, photography, and branding. With more than half of Google searches being locally focused, it may be easier to build a strong but dedicated local following.
- Dietary restrictions: Online recipes have become an important resource for people with food allergies or food sensitivities. Focusing on common food sensitivities like nuts, dairy, gluten, or sugar can help you build a large audience while digging into less-common food allergies can attract a smaller but highly dedicated community.
- Lifestyle diets: Unique diets often call for ingredient swaps or tracking specific metrics that may not be included in standard recipes. If you follow a diet like paleo or keto, you can serve a similar niche of people who cook often and seek specialized recipes and advice.
- Kitchen setup: Do you have a tiny kitchen, hot plate, outdoor kitchen, or other unconventional kitchen setup? Writing about cooking within unique constraints can provide practical advice for others navigating similar situations.
You can also combine several niches—like a blog focusing on recipes from a specific culture that have been altered to be entirely gluten-free—to create a truly original brand.
Whatever niche you choose, it should be something you are passionate about and can continue to write about over time. Readers and search engines love content rooted in experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness, so use your experiences with food as your guiding force.
When starting a food blog, you must have a clear goal so that you can focus your time and resources accordingly. A clear goal will also help you determine what success looks like for your blog, helping you stay motivated and organized as you get it up and running.
Here are some common goals food bloggers have for their websites:
Sharing Your Passion For Food
If you’re writing your blog simply to share your love for food but don’t care about monetizing, you might focus on building a strong narrative voice and an engaging community space. Your blog posts should focus on sharing your personality and story and leaving room for readers to comment or engage directly.
Some goals might be making new connections with your followers, publishing a certain number of monthly posts, or creating a digital archive of your top-loved recipes.
Food Blogging as a Side Hustle
If you hope to make money from your food blog but don’t plan on making blogging your full-time job, you probably want a site that can grow over time. Be clear about what monetization strategies you may want to pursue: do you plan to make money through affiliate links or via an online store? Or maybe you want to run ads on your site or accept donations from your readers.
Even if you start with a simple website, make sure that your platform can support these features down the line.
It takes time and consistency to build a following, especially if you have another full-time gig. Set reasonable, time-based goals for launching your site, creating content at regular intervals, and sustainably growing your audience.
Food Blogging as a Full-Time Business
If you plan to run your blog as a full-time business, you may want to invest more in it upfront so you can monetize your site immediately. You will likely need higher-level website features, such as a store, contact forms, advanced analytics, and an optimized theme to support your content creation, marketing, and sales.
You may have marketing and monetary goals for your blog, like getting a certain number of monthly page views, growing your followers cross-platform, or having a certain number of sales or partnerships in place each week or month.
Food Blogging as a Portfolio-Builder
If you’re a chef, food photographer, or other food-focused professional, you may create a food blog to find new work opportunities. In this case, your portfolio or work product would be at the center of the site, and your website might have a stronger focus on personal branding.
Your goals might include having a clean online presence to share with potential employers or keeping a regularly updated catalog of your best work.
Once you have a clear picture of your blog and your goals, it’s time to choose your blogging platform. We recognize this can be daunting, especially if you’ve never built a website. However, WordPress.com is here to support you every step of the way.
Website Building Blocks
To start creating your blog, you’ll need three things:
- A website host: Your website is stored on a server via a website host. Most new website owners choose managed hosting, which handles both server setup and the day-to-day management of your website, including security, uptime, and regular updates.
- A Content Management System (CMS): CMS software allows you to create, edit, and publish content online without code. We (obviously) love and recommend WordPress for this—more on that in a second.
- A domain name: Your domain is your website’s address on the internet. For example, “yourgroovydomain.com.”
These are the essentials for all food blogs, and luckily, you can get them all at WordPress.com!
Why Choose WordPress for Your CMS?
WordPress is a publishing software that doesn’t compromise on flexibility, customization, or long-term growth.
The WordPress Editor offers drag-and-drop tools that enable anyone to build a website on the platform without needing to write code. There are also tons of pre-designed WordPress themes for food blogs, allowing you to find a brand-worthy professional design and quickly customize it to your needs.
Unlike CMS competitors like Squarespace or Wix, WordPress is an open-source software that enables flexibility and content ownership. In addition to themes, you can access a massive library of free and paid plugins, which help expand your website’s functionality to meet your needs as your blog grows. Plus, with WordPress, you fully own your content and can take all of your content with you if you change hosting providers.
Why Choose WordPress.com For Your Hosting?
WordPress.com is for bloggers like you: our comprehensive WordPress hosting offers everything new (and veteran!) bloggers need out-of-the-box to quickly and confidently launch their blogs and takes care of the technical website management for you so that you can focus on creating content.
With managed features like security, no traffic caps, ample storage capacity, enhanced performance, automatic updates, support, domain names, themes, plugins, and more, we’re a one-stop shop to get you started on your food blogging journey.
With WordPress.com, you’re joining a huge community of active bloggers and site owners. You can find support and advice on our forums and take advantage of our step-by-step guides and articles (like the one you’re reading right now!) that will help you make the most out of your blog from day one. We also have an excellent support team.
Our hosting plans scale with your needs, supporting everything from free personal bloggers to large food blogging businesses.
Your blog name should be short, memorable, and most likely food-related. Make sure it’s both easy to spell and pronounce—this increases the odds that your followers will remember your blog and spread the word with their friends and families.
Stick with straightforward spellings for your blog name, as unusual spellings can create confusion and require verbal explanations like “it sounds like food, but with an e at the end!”
Another important factor in choosing your name is checking whether your domain name is available. Domains with a .com ending are the most popular (as they’re the most memorable) but can be more expensive or difficult to acquire.
If your desired domain isn’t available, you can use other options like .net and .blog. You can also consider a different or more specific name to avoid creating confusion or driving traffic to a competitor’s website.
Use our domain search tool to find an available domain, or select a domain during your WordPress.com registration process (most domain names are free for the first year when you buy a paid hosting plan with WordPress.com!).
WordPress offers a wide range of free and paid website templates (called themes) to suit every visual style. WordPress.com releases fresh themes every month for all types of bloggers, including specialized designs for food-themed blogs.
When choosing a theme for your food blog, look out for ones that are:
- Responsive: Responsive theme elements change size to adapt to your readers’ screen width, ensuring that your content is always legible and nothing gets cut off at smaller screen sizes. All themes on WordPress.com are responsive, and you can check by clicking the Preview button on a theme page and using the dropdown menu to view the theme at different aspect ratios.
- Mobile-friendly: More than half of web traffic comes from mobile devices, so ensure your site is optimized for mobile. Your site should also load quickly when accessing it with mobile data, so keep these factors in mind to ensure your site loads quickly for your readers.
- Food blog specific: Some themes are designed specifically for food blogs. These themes may include pre-built recipe pages and food-blog-focused navigation. While all themes are fully customizable, getting your blog up and running may be easier if you choose one with elements that suit your blog’s specific needs.
Premium WordPress.com themes are included in our Personal plan and above.
WordPress provides an excellent base for your food blog, and plugins can spice things up by adding additional features to your website. While there are many plugins available, we recommend starting with those that support growth, speed, and recipe creation.
When choosing plugins, look for options with good reviews and a large number of active downloads. It’s also helpful to check when the plugin was last updated, as that can indicate whether it’s being actively maintained to be compatible with the most recent versions of WordPress.
With WordPress.com, you can use plugins on the Business plan and above.
SEO Plugins
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tools help make your website more easily readable to search engines like Google. Since most users don’t look beyond the first few search results on a search engine, it’s essential to consider how search engines parse your blog’s content so that it will rank higher in relevant search results.
Many SEO plugins take the guesswork out of SEO by providing step-by-step walkthroughs and automatically updating your site schema behind the scenes to meet evolving SEO best practices. Some popular options include Yoast SEO, All in One SEO, and Rank Math.
WordPress.com also has built-in SEO capabilities with Jetpack for WordPress on the Business plan and above.
Recipe Plugins
Recipe plugins give you an easy-to-use recipe template for your blog posts, your readers a visually consistent and organized recipe format for each of your recipes, and search engines the structured data they need to display your recipes accurately in search results.
You can learn more about the wonderful world of recipe plugins here, but some good options are WP Recipe Maker, Tasty Recipes, and Create by Mediavine.
Image Compression Plugins
Oversized images can slow down your website’s loading time, causing impatient users to abandon your site before it fully loads and ultimately reducing trust in your content. Image compression plugins automatically optimize your food glamour shots and process photos for faster loading speeds. ShortPixel and Smush Image Optimization are two popular image compression plugins.
You will also want to manually optimize your images for quicker loading using our guide on image optimization.
Social Sharing Plugins
Social sharing plugins help you easily share your content on social media sites like Instagram and Pinterest, encouraging readers to subscribe to your content on every platform. Building a cross-platform brand can grow your base and drive long-term engagement.
Some popular social plugins to simplify sharing across your accounts include AddToAny and Blog2Social.
With WordPress.com, you get built-in social features for auto-sharing your posts to your social media channels and allowing your readers to share your content on social media with just one click. Plus, with tags, you can add your posts to WordPress.com’s relevant Reader channels to give your content added visibility.
Once you’ve defined your niche and goals, start by creating a few core recipes or food-related articles that represent your blog’s style—this is your opportunity to hone in on your blog’s unique voice and tone.
Weaving personal stories and practical cooking tips into your recipes creates a distinctive voice that sets your blog apart from generic recipe websites. You’ll develop a stronger connection with your audience and a memorable brand by leaning into something uniquely you.
Research suggests that blog posts around 2,000 words rank better in Google Search. But quantity doesn’t always equal quality. There’s a food-worthy SEO acronym to remember as you whip up new posts: E-E-A-T, or experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness.
Keeping these aspects in mind while creating your content will ensure that your blog posts are highly relevant and helpful to your audience.
Starting with your first post, you’ll also want to establish some structure for your content. Consider using categories (like dessert, breakfast, dinner) to create sorting and filtering options that are relevant to your specific content. As your blog grows, this will help readers quickly find the content they want.
Since digital readers are very visual and associate good photography with quality content, having high-quality images in your posts is important. Consider getting a good camera, like a DSLR, mirrorless camera, or high-end smartphone to improve your photo quality.
For food photography, diffused, natural light works best. To create ideal lighting conditions, shoot by a window away from direct light. Hanging a sheer white curtain in your window will also help create a diffused look. If shooting your photos during daylight hours isn’t an option, you may want to consider investing in an artificial lighting setup.
You’ll also want to reduce visual clutter and keep the focus on the food: use neutral backdrops and simple props for a professional look. Most importantly, the food should look appetizing, so focus on presentation, texture, and color. Start photographing just your dish and add one prop at a time.
It’s important to be thoughtful with staging, framing, and lighting your images, but tweaking in post-production tools like Lightroom, Snapseed, or built-in WordPress tools can help take your photos to the next level.
There’s a lot to consider when starting a food blog, so if you’re feeling overwhelmed, consider these quick tips:
- Focus on quality and unique content: Thoroughly test your recipes and products before publishing, and don’t forget about E-E-A-T! Sharing original recipes, personal insights, and valuable tips will help you build connections with your readers.
- Know your audience: The culinary interests of a single adult will be much different than those of a large family feeding young kids. Busy people want quick recipes that require little cleanup, while gourmands want recipes that help them build new skills. Establishing a core audience will provide a compass for your content creation.
- Post consistently: Set a content schedule that works for you, whether daily, weekly, or bi-weekly, and stick to it! It can take time to build a following, but consistency ensures you’re laying the groundwork for your long-term success.
- Promote your content: Share your content on sites like Pinterest, Instagram, and Facebook to bring new readers to your site. Use SEO best practices to attract organic traffic from search engines, and engage in existing online communities related to your food niche to build your personal brand and provide the content the community needs.
- Be patient: It takes time to build a flourishing blog and to discover what works best for you. Know that you have time and space to grow into your brand, so give yourself grace as you get up and running.
With a little help from WordPress.com, anyone can create a high-quality food blog. From technical expertise to design and writing tips, we’ll be your sous chef on your food blogging journey. If you’re looking for even more resources, check out our companion post on how to start a successful blog.
If you’re feeling ready to dip your spoon in, create your food blog with WordPress.com today.
