Each of our themes run some of the best food blogs in the world, with features and functionality varying slightly depending on their specific needs. Here's a quick comparison table of the features available:
See below table for notes.
Your SEO auditor is going to LOVE this theme!
Notes
Features with * require premium plugins, not included with theme purchase.
Find the full details of the Feast Plugin here.
Performance Optimizations
Just as important as what we do include in the themes, is what we do not include in the themes. Other themes and page builders bloat your website with unnecessary code and styling, making it load slower and distracting you from your main goal: writing food recipes and earning income.
Over a decade of web design, user experience testing and conversion rate optimization means that we actively avoid the following, which run against achieving your goals. We do not recommend or include:
- Sliders + Carousels
- Woocommerce styling
- Multiple navigation menus
- Large hero area
- Above-the-fold ad areas
- Above-the-fold banner + signup areas
- Popups
- Hidden text
All of this can be added via plugins if you require them for your specific setup. This sort of functionality belongs in plugins, and not themes, which are designed for styling. The reason we have excluded (or removed) them from our themes is that we've seen thousands of highly successfully food blogs over the years, and they follow the same patterns - which don't include those listed above.
Which theme is best for pagespeed?
They all are! Pagespeed optimization is determined by your hosting company, and specific plugins that handle functions related to pagespeed such as:
- caching (hosting provider, or a plugin as a last resort)
- image compression (ShortPixel or WPSmush)
- css+js deferring (WPRocket)
- lazyloading images (WPRocket)
These are all complex operations and should not be handled by a theme developer because of the depth of specialized knowledge required. See this post about pagespeed optimization.
Which theme is best for SEO?
They all are! Search engine optimization is primarily determined by the content you create, and how you structure your site. The Yoast SEO plugin is our recommended tool for:
- Content analysis
- Schema & structured data
- Handling 301s
- Meta tag optimization
- Interlinking (cornerstone content)
- Noindex and nofollow (eg. all "tag" pages)
- Breadcrumbs
More details can be found in our SEO for food bloggers post.
Your setup and configurations are just the tip of the ice berg when it comes to SEO however - your keyword research, the content you create, and the network + community + backlinks you establish will determine your success with search engines.
Which theme is best for foodie vloggers (food video bloggers)?
All themes currently have similar support for video, so the decision really comes down to which styling best matches your branding.
Each theme can be fully customized to your own styling with some work, so you're not stuck on any single theme.
Do I qualify to be a Feast customer?
Food blogging is accessible to anyone who wants to put in real effort. Food blogs are nothing more than small businesses, and require you to invest in yourself and believe in your long-term potential.
We differentiate food blogs from hobby blogs - hobby blogs are for people who don't want to invest anything in themselves or their success.
We're not a good fit for hobby bloggers.
Your ability to invest up front will partially determine whether you should start with our themes. For serious bloggers who want to compete in ranking in search engines, at minimum, you'll spend
- $75 - $125 on our themes (plus Genesis, if you don't already have it)
- We recommend the Feast Plugin, at $99/year, which gives you access to all our themes
- $30/month hosting at WPEngine, Getflywheel or Cloudways for WordPress-performance-optimized hosting
- There are $5/month ($60/year) webhosts out there, but this is inadequate and will handicap your blog; you get what you pay for when it comes to hosting
- $10/year on a domain name at Namecheap
- $50/year on a recipe plugin (WP Recipe Maker, or Tasty Recipes)
- Recommended:
- SEO plugin by Yoast
- Caching + Lazyload + Defer by WP Rocket
- Our Feast plugin
If you want to get started on a budget, we recommend signing up for a free blog on wordpress.com and doing your first 10-15 recipes there. It costs nothing and will give you a good feel for how committed you are to the process. Our themes will not work on blogs hosted on WordPress.com - you will have to migrate to self-hosted when you're ready.
Do you offer refunds or a money-back guarantee?
No. No exceptions.
Our target customers are food bloggers who are committed to the food blogging process, and our themes are a small factor in this overall process. Dealing with "hobby bloggers" who want to "try before they buy" takes time and effort away from assisting our core customer base, and is a disservice to them.
Our themes provide a baseline design, take some work to set up, and are not an all-in-one solution. Changes beyond what the demo site contains are customizations and require a developer to implement. For more information, see themes vs. customizations.
Once you have access to the theme files, there's no way to ensure they won't be used. We've ensured we overdeliver on value by offering a theme that cost tens of thousands of dollars to develop, for under $100. For more information, see what am I paying for?
What is the Feast Plugin?
The Feast Plugin is a plugin that adds functionality to all 5 Feast themes. There's also an optional subscription that grants access to all 5 themes.
In 2019 and moving forward, all major functionality updates and improvements will be placed into the theme plugin.
Theme Styles
Each theme is made unique through a combination of different design elements. Here's the unique identifiers for each theme:
- Foodie Pro
- Colors: burnt orange, grey
- Design palette: monochrome
- Image layout: vertical
- Fonts: bold, capitalized, left-aligned
- Brunch pro
- Colors: slate, light grey (+yellow)
- Design palette: monochrome
- Image layout: square
- Fonts: bold, capitalized, centered
- Cook'd Pro
- Colors: slate, light grey (+green)
- Design palette: monochrome
- Image layout: horizontal
- Fonts: lower case, left-aligned, Source Sans Pro, IM Fell Double Pica
- Background styling for certain elements (newsletter, footer)
- Cravings Pro
- Colors: sky blue, grey
- Fonts: Work Sans, Karma
- Image layout: vertical
- Seasoned Pro
- Colors: dark blue, grey
- Fonts: Karma, Rubik
- Image layout: vertical
