The Feast Plugin

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

You can think of the plugin as a brand new theme (minus the styling) designed for 2024, 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.

The Feast Plugin is built in a yearly subscription model because this allows us to reinvest properly into maintaining functionality, updating to comply with rapidly changing SEO, pagespeed, user experience and accessibility best practices, and adapting to the major updates that WordPress is going through.

Everything that we maintain, is one less headache you have to deal with by hiring a developer for $200/hour (+) to do for you. Last year we invested over 1000 hours into updates, the equivalent of $200,000 of development work.

Only a handful of sites are able to make similar levels of investment, which means that anyone not using the Feast Plugin is falling behind the industry at a rapid pace.

Priced at $249/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 after that date.

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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 1,600 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)

Our plugin/updates cover maybe ~10% of what is required to run a successful content site (food blog), which means that there is a huge amount of work that isn't covered by the updates.

Themes vs. Plugin

We recommend all sites start with the Feast Plugin from day 1.

However, for new bloggers just starting out on a budget for the first 12 months may opt for the Feast Plugin Starter. See the getting started guide for more details.

Anyone looking to optimize their site for search engines, pagespeed, user experience and accessibility will benefit from:

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

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Pagespeed

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

• Improve the homepage and recipe index pagespeed through reduced DOM nodes by replacing the theme's outdated "Featured Posts" widgets with the Modern Homepage and Modern Recipe Index using the FSRI block
• The subscribe button in the Modern Menu lets you eliminate javascript from third-party newsletter providers, which can severely slow down a site
• Remove unnecessary DOM nodes by removing comment date links, removing the links to unrelated websites in the comments,
• Reduce the time the browser spends download then rendering external fonts with the system font stack.
• Add pagespeed-friendly retina logos to keep your site fast, and crisp.
• Update to the Modern Thumbnails and Modern Post Images to serve appropriately sized images.

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.

Automatically incorporate Yoast breadcrumbs for improved user experience and internal linking, and disable Yoast breadcrumbs on a page-by-page basis where necessary

Improve user experience on the homepage by grouping posts by topical relevance instead of chronologically, helping users find the content their looking for

Improve the user experience of your recipe index by using the Modern Recipe Index to create a simple navigation page through which users can navigate your site

Improve the user experience of the comments section by removing links to unrelated websites

Improve the user experience on your posts by using the Edit Post Info to provide published and last modified dates, as well as a link to the comment section

Make your content easier to read by increasing the body font size and enabling the system font stack.

Make your categories easier to navigate to by adding featured images for categories, then link to them from any page using the FSCI block.

Help your readers navigate your recipes more easily with the Advanced "Jump To" Links.

Discourage spam by removing the “website” field from the comments form.

Remove the entry-meta from below posts, keeping readers away from low-value pages.

Make it easier for readers to follow you with a sticky Subscribe button for the Modern Menu.

Modern Mobile Menu

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

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.

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

Modern Footer

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.

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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

Yes, the Feast Plugin and themes works for other niches!

While our recommendations are geared specifically towards food blogs, the overall structure and configuration will work for any type content site.

The layouts and site structure we've developed allows for the creation of multiple indexes to support travel, crafts, knitting, parenting, fashion, DIY and more.

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:

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Who is the Feast Plugin not for?

Our target customer are people focused on building a food blogging business and want to focus on creating content.

In the software industry, our setup is what's known as "opinionated", which means that we've chosen a certain way to do things (for maximum compliance) that can technically done many different ways, but we only support our own setup. This is based on our experience supporting thousands of sites and years of feedback from industry experts.

This means that we offer you the most technically correct setup, so that you don't need to waste time researching the nuances of the infinite technical issues, which in turn lets you focus on content.

Before signing up for the Feast Plugin, you must:

• be committed to a multi-year process of growth by learning and re-learning all aspects of running a recipe-focused content site
• understand that the Feast Plugin makes your life much simpler, but does a very small fraction of what's required to run a food blog, and is not an all-in-one solution
• be willing to accept that our setup will not give you everything you want and that you can - and should - hire professionals to customize your site if/when you feel the need

One group that may not align well with our setup includes those who like to adjust every setting or developers who prefer a traditional, highly customized approach with extensive configuration changes.

If you're at all unsure about the Feast Plugin, please email us before signing up.