With growing concerns over SEO, pagespeed and accessibility, we thought it was necessary to put together a list of plugins we typically see problems with, and do or don't ...
Blog
I'm setting up a new site
Congratulations on deciding to launch a "food blog". We'd encourage you to think of yourself more as a publisher in the food industry. What you're building is almost exactly like a magazine: content ...
Blocking Time
Blocking time boils down to the amount of time the users browser spends executing javascript, which is why we recommend avoiding javascript as much as possible. Our current setup uses the Modern ...
728px
Updating the content width to 728px allows for "leaderboard" ads to be displayed, potentially generating more revenue for publishers running ads. In the past, this would have to be implemented via ...
CLS
With the "Core Web Vitals" becoming a larger factor in Google's ranking algorithm in May 2021, we're seeing more questions around this topic. I'd recommend watching the Core Web Vitals for Publishers ...
Lazyloading comments
We do not recommend or support lazyloading comments. Google has said that it will not index anything hidden behind a click/interaction on page, so if you have to "click to load more comments", ...
Pagespeed
There's been a lot of discussion around pagespeed recently and updating themes and theme frameworks, and if you're running our theme + the Feast Plugin: Your theme is not the problem. It's all ...
Branding
Our themes and plugin provide base styling to make your content stand out, but feedback we've had was that people struggled to make it their own. And even after customizing, people were left with ...
Custom list styling
Version 5.0.0 of the Feast Plugin introduced the ability to add custom bullet styling to your lists. We recommend using this in a section to draw special attention or add some branding ...
Disabled emoji rewrites
Certain Wordpress hosting/installation setups have filters enabled that rewrites emoji characters to externally hosted images. This is a poor setup because: it causes an external DNS lookup, ...
oembed
oembeds are a way for Wordpress to integrate content from external websites into your website. By pasting a link to certain networks, the Wordpress editor will attempt to automatically fetch that ...
Icons
Here are some sites for finding icons: ...
Modern Themes
This is currently in development and should be ignored. Stay subscribed to the newsletter to be notified when it's live. Background The themes were designed during a time when styling was the ...
Ingredients & screen readers
Do hyphens change how numbers are read? 2.5 tablespoons salt2 1/2 tablespoons salt2-1/2 tablespoons salt2 ½ tablespoons salt2-½ tablespoons salt Testing spoon acronyms Do fractions change how ...
Convert text to fractions
The Convert text to fractions setting fixes a significant accessibility issue with recipe sites, by replacing text such as 1/4 with a proper fraction, like ¼. Accessibility This is because ...
Branding and consistency on the category pages
The category pages are still something we get support tickets for, with people unsure of how to change the default image size displayed there, despite being covered in the theme setup ...
WordPress 5.5
DO NOT UPDATE TO WORDPRESS 5.5. Wordpress 5.5 contains a number of features. We'll cover off first impressions below. The quick summary is: Update to Genesis 3.3.3Do not update to Wordpress ...
Per Page CSS
The per-page CSS lets you add custom CSS to specific pages, to help improve pagespeed. This is in contrast to the "Additional CSS" page, which loads styling across your entire site, even when it's ...
Web Stories
Web stories are an Instagram-stories style format that Google recently launched. They're a essentially a mobile-formatted slideshow that use images and video, and work well for recipes. Think of ...
Modern Navigation
Your site's navigation has an impact on SEO, accessibility and user experience. SEO While secondary content (link to E-A-T) provides queues to search engines about what's important, there's no ...
Why we don't support block-level styling
The block editor is a powerful tool, but also one that can cause you a lot of harm if you don't know how to use it properly. Generally, we do not recommend making styling changes to individual ...
User Profile Block
The HTML-based user profile widget has long been a staple of the sidebar, giving your visitors information about who you are and demonstrating E-A-T. Note: we haven't recommended using the Gravatar ...
FSRI Block
The Simple Recipe Index (FSRI) block is a block-editor component for building the Modern Homepage. It's intended to be used as a replacement for the FSRI shortcode. It contains many of the same ...
Rethinking the Newsletter
Note: this post is a work in progress Email signups are arguably one of the few assets a recipe site can own and develop, and as such, are a key part of running a food blog. However, current ...
