I haven’t used any recipe plugins personally but have heard developers chat back and forth and also managed a few clients using them. The old plugins were either too simple and missing key features, or they had tons of features but much too bloated. Luckily, the new generation of recipe plugins are so much cleaner-designed and better coded.
It basically comes down whether you want a simple text box for recipes or tons of features.
WordPress cooking/recipe plugins:
- CookBook – great plugin made by highly-respected developers. Marketed as “the world’s simplest recipe plugin” and I highly agree. Just paste in your ingredient and you’re done, no filling out and picking from a bunch of ingredient. Probably the cleanest, easiest, and most lightweight way to get started!
- WP Recipe Maker – beautiful and nice full-featured plugin! Easy import from those still using Ultimate Recipe. (See comparisons.)
- WP Ultimate Recipe – popular, but terribly-coded (bloated as hell, loads tons of JS, causes high database usage)…thankfully, they’ve updated it with the new-and-improved WP Recipe Maker!
Comments from developers in my Slack group:
Cookbook is slim/easy/great. Recipe Maker is a little heavier but has more options if you need them.
– Mike
My favourite, from a point of view of setting up for clients, not from the point of view of writing recipes on a regular basis, is WP recipe maker. I think cookbook is easier to copy and paste recipes in because they have the one box for it, whereas WP recipe maker you need to put each ingredient in a separate line.
WP recipe maker is pretty each to import from other recipe plugins but you have to manually check each recipe and republish.
– Jo
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