Running a successful food blog requires more than just talent in the kitchen. To carve out a place for yourself in the online culinary community, you need a website that can clearly and attractively display your best recipes.
There are plenty of food-focused themes for WordPress websites, and many of them are free. That means you can save your money for a nice cast-iron pan or a new set of knives and still create a food blog that turns readers’ heads.
In this article, we’ll introduce you to ten of the best free food blog themes for WordPress. We’ll talk about what makes them unique and help you decide which one is perfect for you. Let’s step into the kitchen!
What You Should Look for in a Food Blog Theme
Since you can’t smell or taste food through the internet (yet!), culinary blogs have to rely on imagery. That’s why the best free food blog themes mostly focus on enabling you to display recipe pictures in all their glory. Some features that will allow you to do that include:
- Multiple image gallery options
- Widgets that enable you to integrate social media feeds or your latest recipe posts
- Embedded videos in case you also use platforms such as YouTube to share recipes and techniques
- Custom post types for your recipes
By custom post types, we’re referring to unique layouts that include recipe-specific elements. For example, some food blogs include rating systems, cooking times, ingredients lists, and more:
You don’t necessarily need all these features to create a fantastic food blog, but they can certainly make your recipes look more professional and help readers follow your instructions. Choosing the right theme makes it easy to launch your site and get right to posting quality culinary content.
10 of the Best Free Food Blog Themes
Each of the themes we’ve listed below brings something different to the table. Since they’re all free, however, you have an advantage – you can try all of them on for size to see which one is the best fit for your food blog.
It’s easy for kitchens to become cluttered. The same is true for food blog themes. After all, you’re trying to fit a lot of content onto your site. Kale offers a modern, organized design that keeps readers’ attention on your recipes.
When visitors open your blog, they’ll see all your latest posts, which you can assign to different categories. The recipe pages themselves follow a minimalist design. At the end, you can share a short chef’s bio, including links to your social media pages. This makes Kale an excellent option for multi-author food blogs.
Kale is fully responsive out of the box and includes several layout customization options you can use to design a unique-looking food blog with ease.
These days, most of us are used to taking pictures in portrait mode. This can cause problems when it comes to including images on your site, as many of the best free food blog themes are designed with horizontal pictures in mind. Elara however, can easily accommodate vertical shots.
Combine that with this theme’s excellent use of typography, and it makes for a unique style. With vertically oriented images, you’re sometimes forced to use cropping creatively. This requires you to focus on the aspects of each dish that make it pop visually, and that’s an area where Elara excels.
Simplicity is at the base of many web design graphics nowadays, including for food blogs. The less extravagant elements there are on your website, the more visitors can focus on its content. In your case, that means they can pay closer attention to your recipes and salivate over your photographs.
Ariel is all about neatness and works well with all types of blogs, including culinary ones. This theme makes it easy to add social media icons to your website so that you can lead visitors to your Pinterest or Instagram profiles. It also provides author boxes that work perfectly for recipe posts.
If you’ve ever been leafing through a cookbook and wondered what it would look like as a website, you’re going to love Receptar. This free food blog theme eschews traditional blog design and instead uses a split-screen layout that enables readers to jump from recipe to recipe as they scroll down the page.
The Receptar homepage design includes several micro-interactions, which keeps navigation engaging. Recipes are equally fun to read. This theme contains dedicated recipe and instructions sections, which is perfect for skimmers.
Writee isn’t precisely a food blog theme. It was built with all kinds of blogs in mind, but it works particularly well for covering a collection of recipes. Most notably, Writee includes widgets that enable visitors to navigate recipes by tags and categories, as well as a recent-posts section.
It also comes with a gorgeous author box that you can display anywhere on your website alongside links to your social media profiles. Writee is very easy and fresh, which is another reason why it’s one of the best free food blog themes. Your readers can focus on your content without getting bogged down by extra design elements.
Foodica Lite is one of our favorite themes when it comes to sharing recipes online. You can use it to create lists of ingredients with unique styles, share information about each recipe’s difficulty and cooking time, and break down instructions step by step.
This theme also comes with multiple gallery styles you can use to share pictures for each step in your recipes. Plus, it enables you to add parallax scrolling to your images, which is perfect for large headers.
Julia Lite is a theme that Child herself would be proud of. The theme focuses on a classic design style that shines through every page, but particularly so when it comes to recipes. It provides several post layouts as well, each including custom sections for ingredients, directions, cooking time, servings, and difficulty rating.
One of the best aspects of Julia Lite is its use of typography. This theme switches between multiple styles for different elements and includes a lot of small touches to increase readability, such as unique quote designs, headings, and more.
Sometimes, the best blog design is a simple one. If you’re looking for a free food blog theme that enables you to share your recipes but doesn’t come with any frills or complex features to navigate, Type can be an excellent option.
What Type features is a timeless, clean design that works perfectly for most blogs, but especially for those that rely heavily on images. Plus, it enables you to display links to your social media profiles front and center, which makes it ideal if you use platforms such as Instagram for brand partnerships.
Blossom Recipe offers one of the most exciting takes on recipe layouts we’ve seen among the best free food blog themes. Its layouts include ingredients lists that readers can adjust depending on how many servings they want to make.
They can even tick off ingredients from the list, which means your blog can double as a shopping aid when visitors go to the supermarket. Blossom Recipe is fully responsive, so it’s perfect for use on mobile devices in situations like this.
Beyond that, Blossom Recipe’s layouts make it easy to jump from one step to the next so your readers can easily follow along with your instructions. Although the rest of the theme’s design isn’t quite as unique, that only serves to help your recipes stand out.
At first glance, Cressida may look like a standard fashion blog theme. However, it packs a lot more functionality and details than you might expect. Its design is elegant and built around gorgeous imagery, which makes it an excellent option for showcasing photos of your completed dishes on your cooking blog.
Cressida also places a lot of focus on social media. It provides built-in icons for all your profiles, including Instagram, Pinterest, and even YouTube. It also includes some of the most elegant contact form designs we’ve seen, which is handy if you want to encourage readers to reach out or even submit their recipes.
Conclusion
The best WordPress themes aren’t just about style. They include features that make sharing quality content easier. When it comes to food blogs, that means pre-built recipe layouts, social media icons, author bios, and more. Fortunately, there are many free options available, so you may not even have to spend a cent to find the right one for you.
Ultimately, your choice of food blog theme should come down to your unique style. However, if you’re looking for a quick recommendation, Kale’s minimalistic design and advanced social media integration make it a prime option for most culinary websites.
Do you have any questions about how to choose a food blog theme? Share them with us in the comments section below!
