The “blog” template is being deprecated and removed from the Genesis framework after June 19th, 2019. It will be disappearing from all Studiopress themes as of version 3.0, and Feast will be following the lead and supporting the move away from "blog" pages (ie. home page pagination).
Why? Food blogging is constantly evolving, with features and designs evolving to keep pace with modern best practices. With Feast Design Co., you’re getting more than just a template, you’re getting the experience and knowledge that comes with running years of support for the #1 selling food blog theme.
What's wrong with blog pages?
Blog pages are used to provide pagination on the home page - they're a chronological listing of recipes (eg. filtered by date). Readers don't care about what date you posted a recipe.
Visitors simply do not use food blogs like this. Nobody scrolls through unending lists of unfiltered posts that have nothing to do with what they came looking for.
Don’t take our word for this. Go look into your analytics and you’ll see that these “recipe index” and “blog” templates make up less than 1% of pageviews. If that’s not the case, you have a site structure issue to work on.
Traffic to food blogs, comes mostly from Pinterest or Google, and the visitors who arrive are looking for a specific recipe, such as a meat lasagna.
It makes perfect sense to show those people variations on the meat lasagna, such as a gluten free version, and maybe even a spaghetti recipe. You can even link to salads and side dishes that typically go with lasagna.
But it makes no sense at all to have them scroll through random posts including cakes, breakfast pancakes, and gin and tonic recipes.
This is simply not a good user experience, and is not how people use the web in 2019. This is an outdated mental model of the "blogs" of the early 2000’s, which died years ago - good riddance.
Our themes are designed to work with the version of the web that exists when we release them (see: what am I paying for), and the web that exists today has no place for sorting recipes by date. All theme updates moving forward will not support blog pages.
What should I do instead?
Instead, you should be focusing on building a strong site structure that includes related categories, and interlinking your posts. For more details, see: site structure for food blogs.
I'm not ready!
It can take some time to correct your site structure and make your categories usable, which is why we don't recommend updating to Genesis 3.0 when it's first released.
I'm still not convinced
Let's take a look at a different industry: car sales.
Let's say you're looking for a Toyota Rav4, so you head over to a popular auto trading website.
When you get there, you're presented with 100,000 listings spread over 10,000 pages of every conceivable vehicle someone has listed for sale chronologically.
You see boats. You see motorcycles. You see some coupes. There's some airplanes. You start going through the pages - dozens, then hundreds of pages - looking for what you came for.
Days pass. Then weeks. Your entire life is consumed with browsing unfiltered content, because the website owner thinks when they posted something is important, so they want you to look at every listing.
Eventually, you're old and grey, your life has passed you by, and your eyesight is gone and you can't drive anymore, but you find a Rav4 on page 1,589.
The fact is that you arrived looking for a specific vehicle: the Rav4. The website failed to provide you with that.
Not only are you angering your visitors, you're providing a poor user experience, and search engines will eventually pick up on this and send your rankings lower.
This is no different than visitors to your website. 99.99% of visitors are not fan-girl'ing you and emotionally invested in every word you put out, like you are. They just want the recipe they came for. Even your most raving fans are likely to use the search bar to find that amazing recipe they remember making last year.
The best thing to visitors with, is the search bar, which we've added to all themes by default back in January 2019.
The next best thing is to provide them with relevant categories, so that people can find things easier. Maybe once you've found a few Rav4 listings, you'll want to look at some other small SUVs, and you might take a peek at the SUV category to see how the Ford Escape compares.
If the website owner really cares about their users, they may have linked to some larger SUVs, suggesting an upgrade for some percentage of their visitors that have a larger family.
Food blogging is competitive in 2019. You can't get away with providing a sub-par visitor experience, which is what the blog page is.
Leave a Reply