Ever wondered if your recipes offer your audience exactly what they want? We measured the most used features on recipe pages from the platforms we work with and help to deveolop.
See which ones you need to implement on your recipe page in order to create a better experience on your food blog.
Build credibility with recipe likes
We tend to like what other people like. We are also more willing to try new things if someone recommends them. For that reason enabling your audience to leave a like on your recipes is so crucial if you want to build your brand credibility. You want people to be able to react to your content, as it will show future users that it’s reliable. As a result you encourage them to try it out. Based on the results from blogs and platforms we built for our clients, recipe like is a most used feature out of the recipe engagement event set.
A good way of boosting recipe likes is giving your users some value in return. The way we develop this feature for our clients is by creating a personalised list or a cookbook of their favorite recipes out of the recipes they liked. This motivates them to revisit your website, as we made it easier for them to find their favourite content. Recipe like, unlike recipe rating, is more of a personal use, a way to mark good recipes to revisit in the future.
Personalised experience
In order to cater to all of your audience’s needs not only should you think about the right recipes for your platform, but also about ways to make it easy to personalise them. After all, it makes a difference if you are cooking just for yourself or for a larger group of people. Easy calculating portions and ingredients amounts is not only a nice touch from your side, it’s proven to be one of the most used features on the recipe platforms we work with.
Our CMS for recipe creation allows you to create ingredient lists in such a way that it’s easy to modify the portions number or edit particular recipe steps or ingredients. With a couple of clicks we help your blog users to calculate the ingredients list for as many portions as they need. Additionally, we enable them to eliminate or switch ingredients they don’t like, are allergic to or just want to change. Cooking is more fun if you allow some room for experiments. Allowing your users to personalise your recipes is a great way to boost their engagement on your platform.
Smart ingredients list, smart shopping list
One of the most commonly used features MyMenu offers for recipe platforms is the ability to convert the recipes into shopping lists. They can later be shared among the household members, printed or used online and used conveniently while a visit in the store. How is that possible? 
On a typical blog post an ingredient list is just a simple text and the most you can do with it is to copy and paste it or print the content of the page. Thanks to the recipe edit form in our CMS, the ingredients from your recipes are structured as data points. This allows us to perform more complex actions on them, such as converting the ingredients from your recipes into a shopping list. In other words, we make your recipes shoppable.
Possible benefits of adding a shopping list feature to your recipes are increased recipe engagement and, more importantly, creating a new revenue stream for your platform. Linking your blog with a delivery provider enables your audience to shop your recipes with a couple of clicks. Based on different project results for our clients we were able to increase the recipe engagement 4 times and achieve 8% of recipe page visits ending with our shoplist feature.
From recipe to planner
With summer just around the corner, for many of us it’s a moment to have a closer look at our nutrition. And as they say, if you fail to plan, plan to fail – meal planning is a measure taken by amateurs and fitness professionals to better control their nutrition. Apart from weight loss purpose, weekly meal planners are useful in all households in which the goal is to keep a better track of the consumed food and its amounts.
Having that in mind, we help design a weekly meal planner for our clients. The user is encouraged to visit more recipes on a platform if we give them the option to create a whole plan out of them. This results in better traffic retention and builds brand loyalty.
Cooking mode on
A content that is interactive attracts more users and engages them more. Since cooking is an activity, why not make your recipes more involving? We propose adding a cooking mode to your recipes – an intuitive and fun way of using a recipe step by step, thus making the cooking easier.
Pass it on, print it out
Last, but not least, let’s not forget about a staple content features, printing and link sharing. Eating is a social activity so sharing a recipe via standard link or apps is still worth having on a recipe page. Same goes with recipe print. However, it’s significantly less popular, especially when you can save a recipe and display it on your phone. We are happy to notice that other ways of saving a recipe, such as our cookbook feature or weekly planner, gain more interest than a classic print out.
If you want to know more about the ways we can help you grow your recipe platform, contact us.
