Welcome to your new WordPress website! If you’re reading this guide, the CultivateWP team has created a fresh WordPress website for you to start creating content.
Your goal is to get a few dozen posts written so the CultivateWP team can then design and build your new website using actual content.
Getting Started
If you see the popup shown above asking for a login, use “dev” as the username and password. BigScoots password protects the staging site so Google can’t index it before you’re ready to push it live.
You’ll need a separate login to access the WordPress backend where you create posts and pages. When you see this screen shown below, enter the username and password we shared with you by email.
Change your password
We recommend you update your password once you log in. Go to Users > Profile, then scroll down until you see the “Set New Password”. Click it to regenerate the password, and save it somewhere secure like a password manager.
Video Tutorials
If you haven’t used WordPress before, click the “Video Tutorials” link at the bottom of the left-side navigation. These WP101 videos provide a great overview of all the features in WordPress.
You don’t need to watch them all. The first few videos on how the block editor works and how to create new posts & pages are most useful.
Create a category structure
Before you get started writing recipes, you should think about how you want to structure your categories. On a WordPress website, posts can go into more than one category, so Lasagna could be categorized as all three of these: Pasta, Main Courses, and Italian Recipes. This would mean that anyone who visits any of those categories would see the Lasagna post.
It’s best to create your category structure before adding your posts, so as you create posts you can select the most appropriate categories. You can always add & change categories later, so don’t worry about getting it perfect at the start.
We recommend having at least 5 posts in a category, and preferably 15 or more posts. You don’t want dozens of categories with only a few posts each.
Here is the category structure of Grillin With Dad (smaller site) and here’s the category structure of Over The Fire Cooking (larger site). If you need inspiration on a good category structure that’s more mainstream, take a look at https://therecipecritic.com/recipe-box/.
Each category should have a description at the top, describing what people will find in that category and linking to the best recipes in that category. Here’s an example of a category page with a description at the top, and here’s an example what would be considered an optimized category description. Plan on writing a couple of sentences describing each category.
Create content
Go to Posts > Add New to create new posts. Every post should have a title, content, featured image (in right sidebar) and one or more categories. If you select multiple categories, also select which one should be the “Primary” category, since the primary category is used for breadcrumbs.
Use the “Heading” block to create sections of your post, and fill in the content in between the headings. Look at Downshiftology for an example of how long-form posts are commonly structured.
Use headings based on semantic usage and not their visual design. Ex: an h3 is a sub-section of an h2. In this article, “Create Content” is an h2, and “Recipe Card” is an h3.
You can personally copy content from YouTube/Instagram/TikTok and paste it line-by-line into WordPress, but it probably makes more sense to hire a VA (Virtual Assistant) to do it for you while you continue to focus on content creation. You can probably find VAs on social media or through a Google search, but we personally use https://www.momtovirtualassistant.com/ and have had great success with them. Simply click the “Hire a VA” button on the top-right to start the conversation.
Recipe Card
For food blogging, you’ll need a recipe card plugin (where you’ll put your ingredients, directions, notes, etc) which outputs the necessary structured data (aka “Schema”) for Google and other search engines. There are a handful of options, but the de-facto standard today is WP Recipe Maker.
We have installed the free version, but we recommend you purchase the $99 Pro Bundle for adjustable servings, user ratings, automatically calculated nutrition, and more.
When writing posts, insert the “WPRM Recipe” block and add all the recipe details inside of it. This will be the printable portion of the blog post—the part that you always find at the bottom of a blog post. Here’s a great article on how to use WPRM.
More Information
The following videos and articles will help you learn best practices for food blogs and SEO:
- Links should open in the same tab
- Guide to Internal Linking (SEO for Publishers #28)
- How to Update Seasonal Content (SEO for Publishers #25)
- Roundups, Categories, and Taxonomies Explained (SEO for Publishers #20)
- Creating a Content Strategy (SEO for Publishers #19)
- Artificial Intelligence and SEO (SEO for Publishers #30)
- Analyzing Drops in Website Traffic (SEO for Publishers #13)
- Optimizing your content (SEO for Publishers #10)
- Core Web Vitals (SEO for Publishers #6)
- SEO Checklist for Food Bloggers
If you’re into Podcasts, another that would be worth listening to is https://www.foodbloggerpro.com/podcast/ it’s less SEO intensive but they interview successful food bloggers so you’ll glean tons of useful information.