Table of Contents
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:
- 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.
- 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.
Thanks Lauren. Just setting up my website/blog/new business and trying to decide what to use. This was helpful.
Hi, In a way I wish I had seen this post before purchasing WPTasty. I’ve been using their plugin now for about a month and I’m ready to pull my hair out. I switched from MealPlanner Pro because I couldn’t hyperlink any of the ingredients in that plugin. However, I’m finding out the limitations of WPTasty. – The templates “kind of” work. Depending on the theme you use it may or may not fit well in the page, look pretty, or line up correctly. For example, I tried the bold template and it worked very well. When I decided to try the modern compact I ended up with oversized print and pin buttons and the top info (author, time, etc.) did not line up correctly and was all over the place. – You really need to know CSS to be able to tweak the recipe to the way you want it. – The printed recipe is rather sloppy (prints large and can take multiple pages to print one recipe. – I’m debating whether to keep the license and hope for improvements, or get a refund and go back to MealPlanner Pro. I think the possibilities of a good plugin are there but they have a long way to go. Also, $79 per year is a lot to pay for a plugin that still needs work.
Oh no, sorry to hear about all the issues, Heather! Did you try reaching out to their support team? They could probably help with some of the CSS fixes. Unfortunately, a lot of recipe plugins don’t have cards that integrate well with your site unless you customize them. :/
Hi Heather,
I’m sorry Tasty Recipes wasn’t what you were looking for. We try to make the templates work on any themes, however sometimes the theme styling makes things go a little bit awry. In that case, we are always willing and available to help you get the styling sorted so that your recipes look just how you want on your website.
If you have any other questions or feedback please don’t hesitate to reach out to us at support@wptasty.com. We are here to help!
Best,
Raquel
Lauren, Thank you very much for this detailed review. I appreciate that you conclude your review with an ultimate recommendation to try WP Recipe Maker and in what cases to use WP Tasty. So many people end up saying they’re all good and waffling on the ultimate decision. It’s great to know you recommend one and let the reader decide based on her needs.
It’s difficult to try to generalize advice, but I feel the same way when I’m reading a comparison article, so I appreciate you saying this was helpful!
Hi Lauren,
I’m wondering why exactly you think that MP Pro is not so much up-to-date anymore regarding modern requirement (I believe you mentioned something along these lines in a different post)? I’m currently using MP Pro and might consider switching to WP Tasty, if it is of an advantage. Would you elaborate on that briefly, please?
Thanks, Florian
Hey, Florian, Meal Planner Pro is still a good option, but it does have a few drawbacks: (1) images aren’t cropped, so they’re larger than they need to be, and (2) they use shortcodes, so your recipes disappear when deactivated. (These items are the same with some other plugins, as well, so they’re not deal-breakers in my eyes.) It used to be the case that some of their scripts weren’t optimized, but they’ve since fixed that. 🙂