How to Start a Food Blog

How to Start a Food Blog – From Concept to Launch!

Food blogging is a fun and profitable way to participate in a community of like-minded creatives with a passion for food, photography, and writing. Don’t let anyone tell you that the market is saturated, because that’s simply not the case. This post will teach you how to start a food blog in a few easy steps and if you are willing to put in the time and effort, there’s nothing stopping you from building a vibrant, revenue-positive food blog that propels you into the next phase of your life.

This tutorial is for the food aficionado who has the passion to start a cooking blog but might not have all the technical know-how needed to take the first step. If this describes you, just follow the simple directions below and you should have a blog set up in as little as twenty minutes.

Update: We’ve seen an explosive adoption of our Food Blog WordPress Theme over the last several months and amazing and extremely positive feedback is pouring in. Our users love the clean open design, they feel like the images and layout make their content stand out, and everyone loves the quick setup!

Here are a few of the beautiful food blogs that have been created: Crystal Bonnet had created a fantastic site called Raw Revive that’s filled with beautiful photography of succulent healthy food. Another fabulous blog is Always So Hungry created by Steffi who describes herself as a Swedish expat living in East London. Always So Hungry is filled with bright colorful images and lovely recipes like: Bloody Seville: Blood Orange and Seville Orange Marmalade. One last example is Dana’s Danaeats, a striking beautiful food blog filled with lovely baked goods and richly photographed recipes.

Now is the time to join the long list of food bloggers who have switched to our Food Blog WordPress Theme. Our relentlessly friendly support staff will help answer any questions you have about the transition and I promise you’ll never look back.

Choosing a Name for Your Food Blog

The first step in starting a food blog is to choose a name for your blog and also a complementing domain name. The name should be something meaningful, that resonates with you, and that you feel will stick in the heads of your readers. Making this creative endeavor tricky is the reality that the domain name pool has become increasingly small as professional domain dealers try to scoop up any names they think might someday have value. Because of this, you’ll want to put on your creativity hat and think outside of the box.

There are two approaches to choosing a blog name and domain that are worth considering:

1. A Character You Can Build a Brand Around
The first is the Pioneer Woman approach, where you choose and name and domain that represents a character you will be building a brand around. Maybe you’ll be the Mad Scientist of the Kitchen, or the Organic Warrior, or maybe something simple like Jen’s Kitchen Tricks. The idea here is to create a character that you can build up to be bigger than life and that really captivates your readers.

When you think you’ve found the right domain, type it into the widget below to check for availability or visit BlueHost and click the Get Started button.

2. A Brand You Can Build a Theme Around
Another approach is to choose a fun whimsical name that you think will stick with your readers and that you can build a unique visual and editorial theme around. If you choose this approach, your creativity can run wild. Try listing out fun, sweet, cute foodie words. Then mix and match and look for something that really speaks to you. This is a great time to bring in your friends and family to help brainstorm ideas. Sometimes you can pull from your past or present to find special phrases that might work. If you have a cat that spends time with you in the kitchen, maybe there’s a place for his/her name in your domain.

Choosing and Installing a Food Blog WordPress Theme

Now the fun part. 🙂 For a complete list of options check our post on The Best Food Blog WordPress Themes, or check out the themes below that we think are the best four:



Food Blog

Food Blog

 Details »  Demo »

We may be biased but we really do think we’ve created the very best food blog theme available anywhere. It’s super modern, super clean, and we designed it with a content first philosophy so that your photography, recipes, and copy will always shine and the theme elements will never take away from what you’ve created. This theme includes the Recipe Card plugin that will make your recipes look amazing with very little effort. Take a look at the demo to see how great they look. We worked hard to make this theme photo-centered so your beautiful food photography will look perfectly framed not lost in the fluff that so many food blog themes have baked in. If you’re wondering how to start a food blog, this theme is the way to go. It’s going to give you the most professional finished product with the least setup.



Food & Cook

Food & Cook

 Details »  Demo »

The Food & Cook theme offers you 6 fantastic recipe layouts alongside modern styling and a great use of big images. The theme is WooCommerce ready which is a great asset if you decide to sell recipe collections or produce an eBook to compliment your new food blog. There are a lot of themes on theme forest that look great but don’t have many sales but this is not one of them and this is a good sign. Themes that have a positive sales history tend to be updated more often and get a lot more attention when it comes to support. This theme comes with Google rich snippet microdata baked in so you’re likely to see better placement in search.



Foodie

Foodie

 Details »  Demo »

The Foodie theme is a classic style food blog that offers a complimenting recipe builder. You enter the ingredients and the measure of each and the theme will create a thoughtfully organized recipe on the page. I don’t love the design of this theme but it’s been pretty successful and we see it pop up from time to time so it’s worth taking a look at. One nice feature it offers is a recipe rating system so you can see what recipes have gotten the most attention from your readers.



iCook

iCook

 Details »  Demo »

iCook is a modern magazine style food blog theme. The iCook theme includes a recipe builder that allows you to enter your recipes ingredients and measures and the theme will do all the work of outputting an organized recipe. This theme offers a very nice layout with large horizontally oriented images in the sidebar. I find that this is an attractive look on a food blog as many dishes are nicely frames in a horizontal rectangle. I cook is from the team over at Tesla Themes who are known for providing good support and building thoughtfully coded themes.



Daily Dish Pro

Daily Dish Pro

 Details »  Demo »

Daily Dish pro is a typical blog style theme from the folks over at Studiopress. I’m not a huge fan of working off of the Studiopress Genesis Theme Framework, but some developers love this base so it’s a totally subjective call. In terms of aesthetic, I think this theme could be transformed into almost any type of blog especially those in the lifestyle genres.

There are nice high-contrast visual elements throughout the design like black on white sidebar titles and a visually balanced header/menu layout. The theme comes with 6 or more custom page templates and like all themes built on Genesis it offers a range of font, color, and layout options via the customs theme options panel.



Petit

Petit

 Details »  Demo »

The Petit theme may sport a somewhat dated looking design but the feature set has everything you could possible need in a startup food blog or restaurateur website. It offers a range of custom shortcodes like recipes and ingredients as well as built-in rating features allowing you to gather information about the success of your posts.

While this theme doesn’t check off all my boxes for a quality, modern design, WPZoom the theme foundry behind it does have some lovely new themes in their collection so I suggest hopping over there and taking a look.


When you’ve found and purchased the perfect theme for your blog, install it using the directions here.

And now you’re ready to start on your food blogging adventure! Keep your camera handy, as you never know when a photo op may arise.

Additional Considerations

WordPress Plugins

Recipe Card

Recipe Card

 Details »

We did a lot of investigating when we began development of our food blog WordPress theme looking for the best plugins to add useful features to our template. Overall we were pretty disappointed about the results of our search and ended up with just two contenders, Recipe Card plugin, and Easy Recipe. After many hours of testing we ended up choosing to include explicit support for the Recipe Card plugin in our theme. In the end it came down to how the recipes themselves are outputted onto the live page. Recipe Card recipes are neatly organized and attractive with tons of options to modify the colors, fonts, and layouts. Check out our Food Theme Demo for an example.



Easy Recipe

Easy Recipe

 Details »

Easy Recipe was the other option we considered for our food theme. This plugin offers a far more features and more benefits than Recipe Card but the raw output feels a bit dated. If you’re willing to put a little work into some custom css this plugin could be the perfect fit. We’ve considered adding this plugin as an additional recommendation with our theme so watch for that in a future update if you’re one of our many wonderful Food Blog theme users.


SEO Tools: All in One SEO Pack
Spam Filter: Akismet
Pagination: WP-Pagenavi
Sitemap: Google XML Sitemaps

Photography Resources

11 Quick Food Photography Tips to Make Mouth Watering Images
Artificial Lighting Tips For Food Photography
Food Photography Tips for Food Bloggers
How to photograph food

Great Food Blogs for Inspiration

Smitten Kitchen
101 Cookbooks
Pinch of Yum
Minimalist Baker
Pioneer Woman

This post may contain affiliate links, which means Nimbus Themes may receive compensation if you make a purchase using these links.

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About the Author

Evan Scoboria is the co-founder, and developer at Shea Media LLC, the team behind Nimbus Themes, this magazine, and a bunch of very happy clients. He co-founded Shea Media with his wife Kendall in 2009. Evan enjoys hunting, fishing, code, cycling, and most of all WordPress!

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17 Comments

  1. Jrafi Avatar

    Jrafi

    September 29, 2014 at 11:39 am

    thanks for sharing some nice tips for food blogging.in wordpress i found some free templates which really food related and looks great also.I tried one for me.but you are giving more info about this.its very helpful. i will try your suggestions.

    Reply
  2. Khalid Durrani Avatar

    Khalid Durrani

    June 11, 2015 at 12:27 pm

    To start a food blog the most important thing is you should have great knowledge about food and different cuisines around the world.

    Reply
  3. violet Avatar

    violet

    July 5, 2015 at 11:13 pm

    Thanks for the giving some hints about the blog start-up.
    Can you also give a small guide on Blogger.com, and other options except blogger where I can post my daily blogs.

    Reply
  4. Rick Bohan Avatar

    Rick Bohan

    July 21, 2015 at 3:38 pm

    I have a question…the blog I’m prepping to start is closest to the idea of a food blog but…not quite. I’d post about local food and ingredient markets and sources, food events, some restaurant reviews…that sort of thing. I wouldn’t normally have recipes, though it wouldn’t be out of the question. Just to say, the blog wouldn’t be primarily about recipes. I like your theme but…I’m not crazy about the heading style/font. Could that be changed? Or is there another theme that might fit my vision better?

    Thanks in advance for your help.

    Reply
    • SB Avatar

      SB

      July 23, 2015 at 11:33 am

      Hello Rick,

      Thank you for stopping by! The Food Blog theme can be customized in many ways. For ease of use, we offer an options panel where you can change the fonts/colors/sizes for all the elements of the blog/website. You can change the color by using a Color Picker Box of nearly element of the layout on this panel. You can set the font, size, color, style, line height, and case for typography throughout the site.

      Let me know if you have any more questions and I’d be happy to help.

      Best,
      SB

      Reply
  5. Ben Avatar

    Ben

    October 1, 2015 at 3:27 pm

    To start a food blog the most important thing is you should have great knowledge about food and different cuisines around the world.

    Reply
  6. FlorenceJ Avatar

    FlorenceJ

    November 20, 2015 at 3:59 am

    I always wanted to have my very own cooking blog. I have a few great recipes that I always wanted to share 🙂 Thanks for this useful article!

    Reply
  7. Recipes for chicken things Avatar

    Recipes for chicken things

    December 13, 2015 at 9:20 am

    For starting a food blog,this post is really essential.Now, i am starting a blog.So How can I increase visitors in my site?If you give me suggestion,I will be happy.
    Thanks for the post.

    Reply
  8. Shane@Cedarhospitality Avatar

    Shane@Cedarhospitality

    March 15, 2016 at 2:41 am

    These food themes are really very helpful for those people who do not have a programming or website designing skills.

    Reply
  9. nayaki Avatar

    nayaki

    November 3, 2016 at 7:10 am

    nice post

    Reply
    • Sarah Bishop Avatar

      Sarah Bishop

      November 7, 2016 at 6:41 pm

      Thanks!

      Reply
  10. Annisa Avatar

    Annisa

    November 25, 2016 at 8:06 am

    Very useful info from your blog

    Reply
    • Sarah Bishop Avatar

      Sarah Bishop

      November 25, 2016 at 6:30 pm

      Glad you found this article useful!

      Reply
  11. harian kuliner Avatar

    harian kuliner

    November 26, 2016 at 10:52 pm

    good tips bro, thanks for sharing to us.

    Reply
    • Sarah Bishop Avatar

      Sarah Bishop

      November 28, 2016 at 10:48 pm

      Happy to help!

      Reply
  12. acim Avatar

    acim

    November 28, 2016 at 6:48 am

    Useful and interesting information, I will try to my blog

    Reply
    • Sarah Bishop Avatar

      Sarah Bishop

      November 28, 2016 at 10:46 pm

      Thanks! Good Luck with your new blog.

      Reply

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