Feast Design Co.

WordPress Themes for Food & Lifestyle Bloggers

menu icon
subscribe
search icon
×

The Feast Plugin

Published: by · Modified: · This post may contain affiliate links

The Feast Plugin is completely replaces your theme setup with a rewritten modern standard, built not just around aesthetics, but also making giant leaps in:

  • SEO
  • pagespeed
  • user experience
  • accessibility

You can think of the plugin as a brand new theme (minus the styling) designed for 2021, but instead of falling behind on updates, your site is continually updated to meet modern best practices.

This lets you spend less time updating and maintaining your site, so that you can spend more time on creating content and giving your readers what they want.

Experienced bloggers will love...

Updates Without reinstalling

The Feast Plugin will make updating your theme simpler, by providing theme-replacement functionality that can be kept up-to-date without having to reinstall your theme.

Save plugin customizations

Customizations made with the plugin settings are saved between theme changes and plugin updates.

Unlock next-gen features

We're building out next-generation features that are compatible with the block editor.

All new features will be built into the plugin moving forward, instead of the themes, so that we can update them as necessary over time.

Access all the themes

The Feast Plugin grants you access to our entire theme library so that you can refresh your site whenever you want, including:

  1. Foodie Pro v.4.4.1
  2. Brunch Pro v.4.4.2
  3. Cook'd Pro v.4.4.1
  4. Seasoned Pro v.4.4.2
  5. Cravings Pro v.4.4.2
  6. Genesis 3.3.5

Here's what you should know

  • The plugin lives alongside your current theme and enhances it, it does not replace the theme
  • Theme updates are still required for certain issues, but we've been able to deliver approximately 95% of updates via the plugin, instead of requiring a theme update
  • We do not support all site configurations or plugins (such as ecommerce), please see the plugin audit

Priced at $199/year, you can cancel the subscription at any time to avoid being re-billed. Your currently installed copy will remain, but you will lose access to updates and support.

$199.00 / yearSign Up Now

Jump to:

Updates

How often do you update your theme and site configuration based on ongoing changes in best practices, and plugin updates? How often are you aware that these are happening? How easily can you decide how and what to change?

Once a year? Once a month?

Since launching the Feast Plugin, we've averaged one update per day based on issues we see in support tickets, news from search engines, core updates in WordPress, and feedback from industry experts.

That's about 1,400 technical fixes, updates and optimizations that didn't stress you out and distract you from focusing on what you love: your recipes. (note: many fixes are often bundled into a single plugin version update)

Themes vs. Plugin

The classic themes setup is fine for new bloggers just starting out, but anyone looking to optimize their site for search engines, user experience and acessibility will benefit from:

Having trouble figuring out what the plugin provides? For a breakdown, see the themes vs. Feast Plugin post.

$199.00 / yearSign Up Now

SEO

Traffic from search engines typically make up over half of all food blog traffic, and their requirements are constantly shifting. The Feast Plugin has rebuilt the themes setup to meet modern requirements, and made staying up to date with those requirements simpler.

Pagespeed

Improve pagespeed across all pages by eliminating slow javascript, and reducing DOM nodes.

With the Feast Plugin and WP Rocket, our demo sites are scoring:

Your results may vary depending on what third-party resources you've added.

User experience

Building on years of support tickets and feedback from users, experts, and testing, our new setup is more user friendly than ever. This helps users find what they're looking for, reducing bounce rates and complying with Googles recommendations.

Accessibility

Good accessibility often overlaps with good SEO, and makes your content available to a larger audience.

Modern Mobile Menu

The navbar for the modern mobile menu drastically improves above-the-fold content being displayed, improving pagespeed scores.

Old theme nav bar + logo
Modern Mobile Menu

This is a more user-friendly experience.

Modern Homepage

The Modern Homepage moves from a widget-based setup to building with the block editor, which is significantly simpler to customize and offers better SEO and accessibility compliance.

The FSRI block allows you to build the Modern Homepage and Modern Recipe Index using the block editor instead of widgets.

Modern Recipe Index

The Modern Recipe Index leverages the FSCI block (Simple Category Index) to visually display categories.

FSCI block

This helps to:

  • improve site structure and reducing the click depth of categories and posts
  • visually see how your page looks in the editor as well as the front end

The Modern Footer moves from a widget-based setup to building with the block editor, which is significantly simpler to customize.

Modern Sidebar

The Modern Sidebar moves from a widget-based setup to building with the block editor, which is significantly simpler to customize.

Light weight

The Feast Plugin is optimized for pagespeed and performance, removing unnecessary elements that distract users or are simply not useful. We've used feedback from industry experts over the last 7 years to refine every part of the site that the Feast Plugin touches.

This means that we're optimized for:

With the exception of structured data, which comes from Yoast.

Non food blogs

While our recommendations are geared specifically towards food blogs, the layouts and site structure we've developed allows for the creation of multiple indexes to support travel, crafts, knitting, parenting and fashion.

By grouping your categories into a topic-specific index you can help readers better navigate your site, and provide search engines with better context about related topics. See the other indexes section of the Modern Recipe Index.

Additional Styling

You can customize the Modern Homepage in any way you want to match your brand, without needing to change your theme. Check out the Modern Homepage Styling Guide:

Advanced Jump To

The Advanced Jump to block helps you to write better headings on your page and generates additional links in Google to entice readers to click on:

search engine result with jump to links

$199.00 / yearSign Up Now

Pricing

The Feast Plugin is a subscription service:

  • $199/year - Gain access to the Feast Plugin, plus all 5 Feast Design Co. themes, and switch at your heart's content. No refunds (or money back guarantee) due to theme files being non-refundable.

You are purchasing a yearly license subscription which grants you access to plugin updates and priority support.

$199.00 / yearSign Up Now

Requirements

  • Genesis Framework (included with plugin purchase) for the themes
  • Theme from FeastDesignCo (for some of the features, but not all)
  • Hosting with:
  • Not hosted on WordPress.com, and Jetpack not enabled

As of December 2020, the majority of functionality works without Genesis or our themes, including the Modern Homepage, FSRI, Category Featured Images, Modern Mobile Menu and Modern Sidebar.

Support

The Feast Plugin is designed to work as-is, with a DIY setup, and does not include anything not explicitly outlined above.

Refunds

This is a digital product, so there are no refunds for any reason.

Canceling

You can cancel your subscription at any time and you'll retain access until your year is complete. Canceling the subscription does not initiate a refund.

Canceled subscriptions lose access to the grandfathered subscription price. If you originally sign up at $99/year or $149/year and cancel, you'll need to sign up at the current price of $199/year.

FAQ

We'll answer questions as they arise via the Feast Plugin FAQ.

Features and functionality may change as they're developed. Some statements are forward-looking plans, and not guaranteed to be implemented or maintained long-term.

The plugin is developed under the "release early, release often" software philosophy. This enables us to quickly release a new feature, and iterate on it over time based on requests.

Releases

  • 6.4.3 - November 23, 2021
    • Bug fix for Modern Categories: use the Genesis archive headline by default, if not blank, otherwise fall back to WordPress core name field
  • 6.4.2 - November 18, 2021
    • Updated breadcrumbs display based on feedback from Casey and Andrew
  • 6.4.1 - November 14, 2021
    • Display subcategories now only shows the immediate child-categories, not grandchild-categories or lower
    • Fix an issue where the category description on page 2 or later
  • 6.4.0 - November 1, 2021
  • 6.3.8 - October 26, 2021
    • Administrative fix
  • 6.3.7 - October 20, 2021
    • BETA testing of the display subcategories for the Modern Categories
    • Update sidebar styling to fix WordPress 5.8.1 block changes
  • 6.3.6 - October 18, 2021
    • BETA testing Modern Categories
  • 6.3.4 - October 8, 2021
    • Fix additional Yoast issues with hiding breadcrumbs
    • Revert Modern Menu for Desktop to original hamburger menu setup, with option to inline the menu and social icons
  • 6.3.0 - October 7, 2021
    • Fix Yoast issue with hiding breadcrumbs
    • Modern Menu for Desktop refinement: ensure Simple Social Icons widget title doesn't display
  • 6.2.9 - October 5, 2021
    • Breadcrumbs enhancement: automatically hide single-level breadcrumbs to avoid duplicating title
    • Breadcrumbs enhancement: Remove the homepage link from breadcrumbs because the logo already links home (can also improve CLS)
  • 6.2.2 - September 29, 2021
    • Modern Menu:
      • remove display of submenu items (don't use submenus!)
      • update container to semantically-correct <nav> element
      • improve consistency of menu selection
    • Modern Mobile Menu: Improve alignment of modern mobile menu items
  • 6.2.1 - September 27, 2021
    • Desktop Modern Menu breakpoint update: only displays when the screen or browser width is above 1200px, otherwise it will display the Modern Mobile Menu on tablets, phones, or browsers using zoom for accessibility reasons
  • 6.2.0 - September 23, 2021
    • Updated Desktop Modern Menu to automatically inline menu and social icons (BETA setting removed)
    • Tweak for fraction output (now uses UTF8 character rather than HTML entity code)
  • 6.1.2 - September 21, 2021
    • Advanced Jump To refinement
    • Inline Modern Menu for Desktop refinement
      • this removes the "Subscribe" button from the desktop menu, place it in the feast-mobile-menu menu to re-add it
      • this supports translation as well as additional language and landing page options
  • 6.1.1 - September 20, 2021
    • Modern Mobile Menu refinement
    • Modern Homepage search block refinement
  • 6.1.0 - September 7, 2021
    • Advanced Jump To user experience enhancement: add chevron to make it clear this can be toggled open/closed
    • Enhancement: prevent http output of Modern Menu logo
    • Added base styling for the Yoast FAQ block
    • BETA release of the Modern Menu inline menu for desktop
  • 6.0.0 - August 19, 2021
    • Pagespeed optimization (CSS file removed)
    • Enhancement to recipe post template
    • Feast Plugin vs. "Classic themes" release

Past updates can be found on the Feast Plugin changelog page.

«
»