If you've had us perform the Feast + Plugin Setup or the Fresh Site White Glove, you'll find compressed training videos here on how to edit your site.
Along with each training video, there will be a link to the full tutorial. You still need to read the full tutorial in order to get a full understanding of how and why things are set up the way they are.
Jump to:
License key
Follow the instructions on the Feast Plugin for adding the license key.
Site Layout
It's important to understand the distinct parts of your site layout, which are:
- menu / header
- content (including the homepage)
- sidebar
- footer
The homepage is a special layout that includes only the header, content and footer (no sidebar).
Posts vs. recipes
A general point of clarity: a post is where your content lives, and a recipe is a recipe card. A recipe card is a single part of your post, provided by a recipe card plugin.
People (including us sometimes) simply refer to a post as a recipe, but it's important to distinguish that the recipe cards are components that live inside of a post.
Homepage
While the homepage shouldn't be one of your highest traffic pages, it provides the base of your site structure and is key for search engines and users to navigate your site.
See the Modern Homepage tutorial.
Menu
The menu is site-wide and has limited layout options due to pagespeed, CLS, accessibility and site structure requirements.
See the menu tutorial.
Sidebar
The sidebar displays site-wide (except the homepage) and is important for internal linking and E-E-A-T.
See the sidebar tutorial.
Footer
Your footer is where your administrative pages live.
See the footer tutorial.
Post Info
Your post info provides important context for your recipe posts and is important for E-E-A-T.
See the edit post info tutorial.
Breadcrumbs
The breadcrumbs appear above your posts and provide important internal linking for search engines, and navigation for users.
See the breadcrumbs tutorial.
Feast Plugin Settings
The Feast Plugin is designed for individual features to be enabled and disabled as needed. It has been set up for you with our best practices. You can change the settings if you have specific reasons for it, otherwise we recommend leaving them as-is.
Note: if you're using the Feast Plugin Starter instead of the full Feast Plugin, you'll need to upgrade to access the settings.
There is no dedicated tutorial for this because the tutorials for each feature are covered on the settings page.
Feast Plugin Setup
The Setup page contains options for setting up the homepage, recipe index, sidebar and footer (already completed for you). It also hosts some 1-click configurations for recommended plugins (eg. Yoast, Shortpixel, WP Rocket). You should visit this page every 6-12 months to check if your settings need to be updated (due to plugin updates and changes in best practices).
Support
The support page is where you submit tickets whenever you have a question about the Feast Plugin. It contains necessary information such as plugins and version information that are required for us to answer questions.
Recipe post template
The recipe post template creates a blank post that's already laid out to maximize user experience. It's only there as a guideline and sections can be added or removed as needed on a per-recipe basis.
Recipe Update Checklist
The Recipe Update Checklist is a guide for updating older content, in order to bring it up to modern quality standards. Most content should be updated once per year to fill in questions from your comemnts, and update the content to best meet user needs.
Feast Layouts
The Feast Layouts section is where the sidebar and footer are found, with more coming in future updates.
See the Feast Layouts tutorial.
Site Info + E-E-A-T
The Site Info section helps you define your sites niche and provides some baseline for E-E-A-T. Sites with under 100 posts should ignore this until they have a content base down.
See the site info tutorial.
Feast Plugin Tools
The tools section contains some quick fixes for your site. You generally won't need to visit this page unless we instruct you to via the support tickets.
Emojis
The emojis section provides easy access to common food-oriented emojis to use in the Advanced Jump To block. This is totally optional to use, but could result in more attention-grabbing search engine listings which could result in more traffic.
Note that if you're running an old site and having issues with emojis saving/displaying, you may need to contact your host to upgrade the database.
Delete tags
Tags are an outdated setting and should be removed from all sites.
See the tags tutorial.
Images
The image optimization tutorial has the complete information for using images on your site.
Categories
Many people want to recategorize their site when they change a theme, but we recommend against this.
We recommend waiting minimum 30 days after a theme migration to make any changes. This allows time for Google to recrawl your site and update Google Search Console, which makes troubleshooting and identifying issues much simpler.
See the categories tutorial for further guidelines.
What's next
Now that your site is set up and configured, your focus should be on content creation with:
- keyword research
- on-topic writing and content (eg. using the recipe post template)
- high quality photography + process shots
- video (highly recommended)
- internal linking
Along with updating each piece of content once per year following the recipe update checklist.
Your goal is to develop a process to crank out as much high quality content as you can, as quickly as you can, so that you can get monetized and start to outsource parts of content site that aren't related to creating content.
A baseline for hitting 50,000 monthly sessions required for Mediavine is 150 high quality recipes + 150 backlinks in 12-24 months. 50,000 monthly sessions will net about $1,000/month in ad revenue and is the base for a self-sustaining content business.
Continuing education
Running a recipe-focus content site is a long-term project that's going to require non-stop learning for the next couple of years. We highly recommend consuming everything you can from:
- TopHatRank webinars
- FoodBloggerPro
- CookingWithKeywords for keyword research
- PrettyFocused for food photography
Outsourcing
The #1 service we recommend once monetizing is nerdpress, who will take over managing plugin updates and various technical issues related to your site. At $350+/month, they're able to offer much more site-specific support for non-theme issues than Feast does.