Tasty Tuesdays: Maintenance of a Food Blog

Most of you that link up here publish recipes frequently on your blogs.

Does this describe you?

• You are a foodie blogger.
• You may not be “foodie bloggers” as you publish other content besides recipes, but recipes are one of the types of posts that you publish.

I am not a “foodie blogger,” but I publish a recipe weekly on Creative K Kids. After four years of publishing recipes, maintenance must be done! One frustrating fact about blogging is that things in the blogging world are constantly changing! With all the changes in SEO and Gutenberg, it’s hard to keep up. In fact, I don’t keep up. I have five kids, work part-time, am a pastor’s wife . . . I wear many hats. I don’t have the time nor the brains to try to keep up with everything that is happening in the blogging world. So, I let others keep up for me.

I have followed MaAnna from BlogAid for a few years now. I have hired her at least twice to do a security inspection/site audit and a https conversion for Creative K Kids. I get her newsletters and follow her on Facebook and YouTube. Some months, I am better at reading her posts than others, but I try to at least scan her Tips Tuesday and see if there’s information I need to take care of on Creative K Kids.

This week, I used two of her posts to work on maintenance of Creative K Kids — and both items had to do with my recipes. I would find it hard to explain it all, so I will link to her posts which you can read.

• The first thing I did was change my recipe plug-in.

I used to have more time for blogging. It’s hard to believe that I had more time for blogging when I babysat and had babies of my own — but I did. I was home all day and had my kids’ nap time and even some time during the morning to work on my blogging posts and to share to groups and to participate in reciprocating threads for all the social media sites. I used to share my recipes to Yummly groups and we would all go like each other’s recipes on Yummly. So I used a Yummly recipe plug-in to make it easy for everyone to “Yum” my recipes. But that plugin hasn’t been updated for over 2 years and doesn’t have the schema mark-up that Google is looking for. And I want Google to like my posts in its search engine!

MaAnna recommended one free plugin called WP RECIPE MAKER. Marilyn Lesniak of Marilyn’s Treats tested many recipe plug-ins for MaAnna, and this is one of the two that they liked the best and the only one that has a free version that worked fine for me. I found Marilyn’s post really helpful for how to get the plugin and how to use it. There was also a video on YouTube that was available in my dashboard when I activated the plug-in. MaAnna’s post explained why I needed to switch to a better plug-in.

What I LOVED about this plugin is that it was able to import all my recipes from Yummly. I did not have to copy and paste all my recipes!! I thought I was going to have to spend hours moving all my recipes to the new plugin, but it was done in a matter of minutes. Now be smarter than me and make a backup of your site before you install WP Recipe Maker — just in case something goes wrong. I did not make a back-up until afterwards; and fortunately, everything worked fine. I imported all my recipes, and deleted the Yummly plugin. It also noticed that I had used to use two other plugins for recipes (About 5-10 recipes were showing up for these old plugins.) I imported the recipes over to WP Recipe Maker even though I no longer use those plugins. So somewhere in my files some of those plugins didn’t get completely deleted.

The recipe styling is not the most gorgeous I have ever seen; but the plugin was easy to use, people can still print my recipes, and everything is functional. I need to go and tweak each recipe for SEO purposes, but this plugin will be compatible with Gutenberg when Gutenberg rolls out, so I don’t have to worry about this plugin needing to be changed when Gutenberg happens.

Here’s how easy it is to import your recipes from a different plugin to WP Recipe Maker:

• Make a full backup of your site.
• After you add and activate the WP Recipe Maker plugin, go find it on your WordPress menu. It has it’s own tab. Hover over it, and you will see “Import Recipes” pop up. Just follow the directions that come up after you click on Import Recipes. It is super easy. See how it found all my recipes on my Yummly plugin?
  
• Check that the recipes imported correctly. You can also change a few of the styling options under the Settings tab.
• Then you can check on the issues that WP Recipe Maker may have found. For example, some of my recipes have no parent page. I will have to look into that.
  
  None of my recipes have a green light for SEO. I don’t know if I am going to do everything that could be done such as adding calories, but I will dig around and see what I need to correct to make the recipes do better in the search engines as well as for those who are looking at my recipes.

There was one more project I started working on in relation to my food posts, but I am out of time to write about it. I am going to continue working on the maintenance of my recipes the next couple of weeks and share with you on September 11 what this project is and what plugin I started using.

Come back next week to see which recipes received the most views for the month of August!

PLEASE LINK UP TO THREE FOOD POSTS TO THE TASTY TUESDAYS’ LINKY PARTY!

• PLEASE follow the hosts of this party through one of their social media listed below. They will visit your post and pin it. Just pick one (or more) of the options below and please follow them.

**Tammy from Creative K Kids (Blog)**
Pinterest/Facebook/Google+/Twitter/Instagram

**Audrey from That Recipe (Blog)**
Pinterest/Facebook/Google+/Twitter/Instagram 

**Lisa from Blogghetti (Blog)**
Pinterest/Facebook/Twitter/Instagram

• Please link up to three food-related posts that have never been linked up here before.  Posts containing alcohol also will not be pinned.
• Place this button or a link to this post somewhere on your site–either on the actual post or on your sidebar or on your party page.

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• As a thank-you for linking up, we will pin your recipe to the Tasty Tuesdays at Creative K Kids Pinterest board. Please follow the board to see all the great food recipes!
• Creative K Kids is not responsible for stolen images or the mis-use by others who have found your image through CreativeKKids.com.
• By linking up, you agree to let any of the hosts or co-hosts  use your pictures and links if they decide to feature your post. Your photo may also be used for promotion on any of their social media outlets.
• If you would like to receive an email reminding you to link up to this party, please click HERE and add your email address to the list! I will only send you an email about linking up to this party.