WP Site Care to Launch Cookbook, A Commercial Recipe Plugin

WP Site Care announced that it will soon be entering the WordPress products business with a commercial recipe plugin. Co-founder Ryan Sullivan said the company is partnering with Feast Design Company to launch Cookbook, a full-featured recipe plugin that is mobile and SEO friendly.

“A good chunk of our current customers are food bloggers and it’s a constant pain point for them,” Sullivan said. “So many feel abandoned with Ziplist, Easy Recipe, and a few others now being unsupported. They don’t know where to turn or what to do. We became really familiar with what it is they want and need and decided to build a solution around that.”

Feast Design founder Shay Bocks is designing the product and said she is also “serving as a conduit between the food blogging community and the development team at WP Site Care.”

“For most food bloggers, the most troublesome aspect of existing recipe plugins is not being able to get support when they need it,” Bocks said. “It’s disheartening to hear that bloggers are committing to plugins and then find that they can’t get answers from the people who built them – or when they find out that the developer has seemingly dropped the product altogether.”

Bocks is also working with WP Site Care to ensure that Cookbook is designed to meet proper SEO requirements for recipes. This is imperative for food bloggers working to get noticed by Google and Pinterest, two of the most important traffic sources for this niche.

Cookbook will be priced at $49 and WP Site Care plans to launch the product with a 100% commercial business model. Sullivan said the decision not to go the freemium route will be key for the long term stability of supporting the plugin.

“I think where some of the other popular plugins have really struggled is because they’ve had to support a massive customer base while only getting paid by a portion of that group,” he said. “Eventually you get overwhelmed and burn out, and we want to avoid that.”

Many WordPress recipe plugins have a convoluted templating system that is difficult to customize, but WP Site Care is taking a modular approach to templating, designed for small easy customizations using filters to modify the output.

“It’s not really revolutionary, but definitely keeps things clean and reduces the cases where theme conflicts occur,” Sullivan said.

According to the Cookbook pre-launch page, the team is aiming to build “a recipe plugin that actually works.” Sullivan said that the product will distinguish itself from existing recipe plugins by providing a workflow that is intuitive for recipe bloggers’ needs.

“The core cookbook plugin is going to focus on being really easy to use and streamline publishing workflows,” Sullivan said. “It’ll have features like nutrition info, schema markup, being print and mobile friendly, but overall the core emphasis is building a product that works the way that recipe bloggers do. As far as we can tell that doesn’t exist yet.”

Cookbook is currently taking pre-orders for a planned launch date of September 27.