Should I Switch Recipe Plugins to WP Tasty Recipes?

Disclaimer: I get to work alongside Alexa, Raquel, and the rest of the Food Blogger Pro team, and I love them. That may affect my judgement of their products in this review.

We’re definitely on to something with recipe plugins. WP Recipe Maker, Cookbook, and Tasty all work in a similar manner: they’re custom post types that can be inserted into your post and modified using a pop-up editor. If you’re still on EasyRecipe, you really should switch to anything and worry about the “best” plugin later.

Need help choosing? Let’s get into Tasty, now. You’ll find links to Cookbook and WP Recipe Maker at the bottom of the post!

Pros

• Good for SEO
• Custom Post Type
• Visuals
• Support
• User experience, which is enjoyable nearly every step of the way!
• EasyRecipe import

Cons

• User experience (yes, it’s both a pro and a con)
  • Individually formatting ingredients and instructions
  • Limited functionality (No Imperial-Metric conversions)
• No current degradation options

Discussion

SEO, CPT, and Visuals

I’m going to pass over these items, since they’re the same as Cookbook: structured data for both Google and Pinterest, smart recipe storage, and recipe styles that pull from your theme visuals. They also have some templates that are developer-friendly and free for all users to download (although installation can be tricky, depending on your level of experience). Oh, and I love their pretty website & the fonts on their pretty website (seriously, Bariol is gorgeous).

Support

I get to work with the FBP team, and I love them. They go the extra mile to help you out as much as possible. In conjunction with their support docs, you can’t go wrong with the Tasty team and their support. 🙂

A+ UX

There are a few places where I really like the Tasty Recipes user experience:

1. When you need to enter the license key: instead of a notification taking you to another page, there’s an entry line in the notification for immediate activation.
2. When you need to convert a single recipe: while bulk importing is supported, if you want to import your recipes one-by-one you can edit the post and click the button in the notification at the top to automatically convert the recipe over. (Note: I’m unaware if this works with multiple recipes in a post – can anyone confirm?)

Tasty really seems to have thought of some of the small usability details that can make the difference between a good plugin and an enjoyable plugin. User experience is an area where this plugin shines and gives it a lot of potential moving forward.

Automated import from EasyRecipe and …

At the time of writing, Tasty only imports EasyRecipe recipes. However, they’re quickly improving their plugin and will surely include more plugins over time. (Email their support team to cast your vote!) Notably, their importer is typically flawless, including importing of links.

Formatting – oh, formatting

There’s this user experience dilemma where we (a) want to give users as much control as they might need and (b) want to make sure they can’t mess up. So it’s easy to understand why one would choose to enable rich formatting in their recipe ingredients and instructions section: they want you to have control over your site (good), allowing out-of-the-box support for things such as affiliate links (also good). However, this kind of power opens type-A people to headache (bad), international readers to headache (also bad), and even power users to headache (again, bad).

The good

Using a rich formatting box is an easy way to give advanced features to the user. You can have multiple ingredient or instruction sections separated by headers and you can add affiliate links to your ingredients – all while using a similar interface to what you’re used to with EasyRecipe. It’s super intuitive for the recipe author.

The Bad

That said, you get this functionality with a trade-off.

• Type-A blog owners have to manually format their lists exactly the same in every single recipe. I definitely think the recipe plugin should do this for you, meaning you can easily modify it, using PHP or CSS, to look exactly how you like it across ALL recipes. Instead, you have to update every single recipe if you want to make a formatting change. When you have a large blog, you quickly learn how much you don’t want to be put into this position.
• International readers don’t have imperial-metric conversion support. (Note: this may be coming, as serving sizes are now supported.)

Degradation

If you converted all of your recipes to Tasty today, then deactivated your plugin, you’d be in bad shape… you’d have no recipes in your posts! This is the kind of problem many people want to avoid, having experienced a similar issue with Ziplist in the past. That said, their team has already expressed that this item is currently in progress, so I’ll leave it at that. Definitely read the other recipe reviews for more information on this. 🙂

Decision: Worth further consideration

Right now, I still think you’re best off going with WP Recipe Maker. It’s the most feature-rich and comprehensive plugin, plus it’s got a lot of long-term functionality support for you to grow into. That said, Tasty already shows more promise, in my opinion, than Cookbook. If you’re coming from EasyRecipe, have a lot of recipes, and don’t want to change your workflow, Tasty is a great, low-risk option for you.

Still deciding? Read about Cookbook and WP Recipe Maker.