As of this month, I have been blogging for two years. One year ago, I began self-hosting. There were a lot of things I took into consideration when I made that decision, but the one thing that pushed me over? Recipe card plugins.

It’s amazing how one little thing can completely change the look and feel of your blog.

The BEST Recipe Card Plugin for Food Bloggers

I started out using Ziplist Recipe Clipper, which was…fine. It got the job done. But if you don’t have a very intimate knowledge of CSS, you can’t customize it. Which meant most of my recipes looked like this:

As I said, it does the job. But it just wasn’t what I wanted.

I have been looking into other plugins for a while, but they always get such terrible reviews. In all honesty, Ziplist doesn’t get very good reviews either (mostly because of the customization thing).

And then last week, I was participating in a link party. I can’t remember whose blog I was commenting on, but her recipe card was gorgeous. There was no watermark on the bottom, though. So I clicked “save” and it took me to a “Yumprint” URL.

When I got home, I looked it up and then immediately installed their plugin.

And I will NEVER go back to Ziplist!

Note: I am not trying to sell you anything, this is not a sponsored post. I just really love this recipe card!

Yumprint Recipe Card

First, the Yumprint recipe card is FREE (download the WordPress plugin here).

If you haven’t seen my recipes, you should check them out! Because these cards are gorgeous and there are SO MANY built-in customizations! The Ziplist card I just showed you? Here’s what it looks like now:

It’s so much prettier and has so many more details!

Pros:

• Beautiful and easy to customize
• Interactive buttons (Ziplist wouldn’t even let me insert rollover images)
• Readers can rate a recipe and leave reviews!
• Picture can be a thumbnail (as shown above) or it can be larger. Again, more customization!
• The plugin calculates the nutritional information on its own! It’s not 100% accurate, but it’s usually pretty close! Most of my recipes have been accurate within 10 calories.
• I haven’t used the Support forum yet, but I’ve read through it. The mods are actually helpful (unlike with Ziplist).
• You can create and save your own theme, which is nice if you like to change things up every once in a while. You don’t completely lose your customization if you choose to go back at some point.
• Customization shows a preview of your changes.
• Shows you a full Nutritional Facts label if you click on “more.”
• Even though the nutritional information cannot be manually changed, if it is COMPLETELY OFF and it’s bugging you enough, you can click on that “Does this look wrong?” link and send them an email about it. So at least you’re not completely helpless!

 

Cons:

• Nutritional information is not always so accurate. And you do have to put in exact measurements. For instance, with mixed drinks, most people just use “shots” as a measurement for liquor, which the plugin does not recognize. Without the measurements, my Pumpkin Bombs were calculated at 1500 calories (NOPE!). Once I added the measurements in ounces, they were brought down to a more accurate 237 calories.
• Unlike most other recipe card plugins, this will not import your Ziplist recipes. If you want to change the recipe card on your old recipes, you will have to do it by hand. To me, it was worth it, but I doubt everyone will feel the same way considering how time-consuming that is.
• Nutritional information cannot be edited manually. However, it can be disabled.
• Only shows “Serves” OR “Yields,” not both.
• Does not let you use your own fonts in custom changes. However, the large number of beautiful fonts it already has installed is perfectly adequate. I’m very happy with it.
• You can change the fonts of each section, but some sections are tied to each other. For instance, the nutritional information and the time information are the same font, no matter what.
• There have been complaints that the plugin will significantly slow down your site. I have not had this problem. However, I find that the plugin itself can be rather slow when I first save a recipe. After that, it’s great!
• If there is a way to customize how the recipe looks when it prints, I haven’t figured it out. It’s on my “To-Do” list.
• If you have to rebrand, you recipes will not transfer. (Unlike with Penci Recipe, which is what I’m using now because it came with my theme.)

Overall, the pros (for me) FAR outweigh the cons. This plugin adds so much style to my blog. I can’t believe how much more professional it looks!

If you’re a food blogger (or you post recipes at all) and you’re not as happy with your current plugin situation as you’d like to be, DEFINITELY give this one a try!

Download the Yumprint Recipe Plugin!

What plugin do you use? Do you like it? I would love to hear your thoughts in the comments!