How to Start Your Own Food Blog Website

Food blog and recipe sharing websites are trending these days, and therefore, they have the potential to earn a steady income.

Do you wish to start a food blog and share your recipes? If you are a beginner and do not have any techy knowledge, there is nothing to worry about. We have got you covered. 

In this guide, we will throw light on how to start a new food blog successfully and also earn money from it. You can easily build an inexpensive and feasible blogging website of your own. You can easily be starting a food blog at a cost lower than the overall price of the ingredients involved in your recipes. 

To set up a self-hosted beautiful and functional website, you can follow these steps.

1. Choose a Content Management System

A content management system is necessary to edit and manage the content needs of bloggers. It allows to upload, move, resize, copy, paste and link elements within the blog. The various Content Management Systems include Joomla, Blogger, and Drupal etc. However, the most popular and widely accepted content management system is WordPress. WordPress is free as you need to set up and host it yourself.

It is recommended to use WordPress.org for your blog because WordPress has a highly customizable platform. It gives you great functionality, works great with blogs and websites  

WordPress provides options for limitless creativity and offers great functionality that works great with food blogs and can help create a website as well.

2. Choose Your Domain Name

A domain name is your website address on the internet that people type to get to your website. You must put in some careful consideration before choosing a domain name for your food blog website. It must be catchy, short, unique, memorable and easy to spell. You can brainstorm and choose a name that reflects the blogger’s style and personality.

Once you have some potential names in mind for your blog, you’ll need to check their availability. Your domain name must end in .com, since .com is the standard domain suffix. You must keep trying possible names until you find the one that is available in .com. It is advisable not choose hyphens or other punctuation marks to make it work

For this, you can choose a domain checker tool such as Bluehost. You can simply enter your desired domain name and hit “Check domain” and it’ll tell you if your domain name is available. 

3. Find a Reliable Web Host 

Next, you need an affordable shared hosting plan that offers automatic WordPress installation. Web hosting is where your website files are stored and every website needs web hosting. You can choose a host like Bluehost and then subscribe to a suitable plan available. As a beginner, you can start with the basic plan which is the least expensive and offers everything you need to get a good start. You can upgrade later if you wish to.

Next, you must choose the term for payment for hosting upfront. As a beginner, 1 year is good to begin. If you are serious about blogging and want to save more money you can choose a longer-term. Finally, click on “Get Started Now” at the homepage to start setting up the blog.

Step 3: Install WordPress

This part is easy if you chose an affordable shared hosting plan such as BlueHost, as it offers automatic WordPress installation. Next, log into your WordPress dashboard, go to Settings > Permalink Settings page and change your permalink structure to “Post name.” Then hit save. Now it’s time to make your blog look awesome.

4. Choosing a Perfect Food Blog and recipe Theme

Next comes the most crucial step in choosing an appropriate WordPress food theme. There are both free and paid themes available in the marketplace. However, to save time and headaches that you save down the road choosing a premium food theme is recommended. You can check out the latest list of top 10 WordPress theme for food websites.

Things to keep in mind before choosing a WordPress theme

Well designed Layout

The food blog WordPress theme must offer a clean modern and user-friendly layout. It must be well coded to make your website look awesome. The website must have beautiful images, ample of whitespace for text and allow easy content scrolling.

Lightweight

Next important feature is that your food blog website must load faster. The theme you choose should be lightweight to achieve that. Any mistake in choosing the theme, your website would end up glitchy and laggy!

Optimized for search results

A good built and optimized website naturally rank higher in search results than a site built on a theme that is full of errors. The SEO optimized themes are important to crawl up in search engines and also bring more website traffic.

Mobile-Friendly

The theme must be mobile-friendly. A big majority of people are now accessing the websites from a mobile device. The design, look and feel of the food blog and recipe website should be mobile friendly too. The website must be responsive so that it adapts to all screens. Moreover, the theme should also be retina ready, so that it looks neat and clear on all big and small screens. In this way, your website can get a significant amount of data not only from desktop users but also to mobile users and from other screen devices.

Gutenberg ready

Gutenberg, the WordPress block editor provides a smooth content management experience. It allows easy content creation with simple drag and drop and is preferred over page builders by most content creators nowadays. Make sure your food blog theme is compatible with WordPress Gutenberg block editor.

Great support

When you experience technical issues, a responsive support team and/or community forums are invaluable resources. Any faults or imperfections found in the products will be resolved by the support team and it is an added advantage of choosing premium themes.

So, start blogging!

So, now you are ready to blog and share your recipes. You can easily publish your recipes, stories and photos and earn money.