Many people dream of starting a food blog. This desire is so prevalent there are hundreds of WordPress food blogging themes to pick from, ranging from barebones layouts to options that include dozens of advanced features.
Kale Pro belongs squarely in the latter category. Our theme includes all the functionality you need to launch a stylish food blog, such as custom recipe layouts, social media integration, and much more.
In this article, we’ll take a closer look at Kale Pro and break down its features and pricing. Then we’ll show you how it fares in action when it comes to creating and publishing recipes for your food blog. Let’s get to work!
An Introduction to Kale Pro
Kale Pro is, at its core, a food blogging theme. However, like a lot of modern blogging themes, it’s highly versatile when it comes to what kind of content you want to use it for. That versatility stems from two factors:
- A clean, modern design that puts the focus on your website’s images, whether they’re pictures of food, travel, or anything else you can imagine.
- It includes several food blog specific features, such as built-in recipe cards and a recipe index template.
- A wide range of layout elements, including page and post banners, an email subscription widget, multiple blog feed styles, and more.
Despite that versatility, it’s clear that Kale Pro was designed with food bloggers in mind. If you fall within this category, you’ll quickly notice the theme includes several unique features to make your life easier, which we’ll break down throughout this review.
For now, suffice it to say that with Kale Pro, you get a theme that offers excellent performance, a modern, stylish design, and advanced functionality. You can have all of this for a one-time setup fee of $39, which includes one free month of support and updates. Beyond that first month, we charge $7.99 per month for ongoing support. This subscription can be cancelled at anytime – if you do not wish to pay anything after the initial purchase, feel free to cancel your membership within the first month and you will incur no further charges.
If you’re the kind of person that prefers to test themes before buying them (which is always a smart move), you can check out our Kale Pro demo. We also highly recommend trying out the free version of the theme if you’d like to try out some of the basic functionality before making the purchase. Although it doesn’t include the full range of features its premium counterpart does, it’s still a solid budget option for food blogs.
Kale Pro’s 4 Top Features for Food Bloggers
Our theme includes several features designed with food bloggers in mind, ranging from content layouts to Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tools. Let’s talk about how Kale Pro can help you break out of the kitchen and into the world of blogging.
1. Structured Data to Refine Your Recipes’ Search Engine Results
In case you don’t know what structured data is, it’s information encoded in your pages that search engines can interpret and display in their results. For example, if you look up recipes using Google, you’ll notice several of the results include information such as cooking time, difficulty, star ratings, and more:
Including structured data for your content is helpful for driving organic traffic to your blog. Search engine users are able to see key details that may help them choose one result over another. For example, in the image above, they might be drawn to the second result because it has the fewest calories.
Usually, adding structured data to WordPress requires you to use a plugin or deal with code. With Kale Pro, you can skip that process since our recipe builder enables you to add this information directly into each post. The result looks something like this:
You can see the cook time, star rating, and difficulty listed at the top of the card. Kale Pro formats the code for this data so that search engines can read and display it properly.
2. A User-Friendly Recipe Builder for Professional Post Layouts
Speaking of our recipe builder, this feature makes it easy to incorporate advanced layouts that would otherwise be difficult to create in the WordPress editor. Instead, Kale Pro enables you to simply fill out a few fields and the theme applies its custom style to your information.
The builder includes fields for structured data related to recipes, as well as lists of ingredients and instructions.
Displaying your recipes in a clear, professional manner can lend credibility to your food blog. Plus, it makes it easy for readers to follow along and recreate your dishes on their own. We’ll walk you through how to use this feature in more detail later in this review.
3. Social Media Integration to Promote Your Blog’s Content
Earlier, we also mentioned social media integration. This is a key element for any modern blog, but much more so for foodies since the best way to show off your skills is through photos. That means you probably rely heavily on social media platforms such as Instagram, which you may want to highlight on your blog.
With Kale Pro, you can integrate your Instagram feed anywhere on your website using a free plugin we designed to work with the theme: Social Images Widget. The results look stunning every time:
At the end of the page in the image above, you can also see social media icons for most major platforms. You can place these links anywhere on your site to lead visitors towards your social media profiles. For instance, you could combine them with our biography “About Me” widget to display them in your About section.
Kale Pro also comes with built-in Pinterest sharing. You can enable your post images to show a “share to Pinterst” button by just toggling this option on in the Customizer!
4. A Versatile Recipe Index Template to Create Recipe Collections
This is a special template available in this theme using which you can display an “index” or collection of recipes belonging to specific categories. You can have as many Recipe Index page as you like.
A brilliant use case of this feature is to create a collection of all your holiday recipes, favorite deserts, and so on. Creating the recipe index page is as simple as choosing the Recipe Index template under the page options and then selecting the categories that you’d like to include.
How to Publish Recipes Using Kale Pro
As we briefly mentioned before, when you run a food blog, it’s important for your recipes to be clear and easy to read so your visitors can recreate your dishes. With Kale Pro, this is easy to accomplish through its recipe builder.
Before we show you how Kale Pro’s recipe builder works, it’s important to mention this feature requires you to use the WordPress Classic Editor. If you’re using the Block Editor, you can revert to this option using the Classic Editor plugin.
Once you open the editor, you’ll notice a new button in the toolbar. It’s shaped like a carrot and located below the title field:
Clicking on this icon will bring up a window that includes several text fields you can fill out, including all the key information a recipe needs to shine:
All the fields here are fairly self-explanatory for anyone familiar with reading or writing recipes. For the instructions and ingredients list, simply separate each item so it’s on its own line. Kale Pro will know to format the information so it appears like the recipe card we showed you earlier in this post.
Once you’ve added all the necessary information, click on the OK button and the theme will generate a unique shortcode for that recipe, which you can use anywhere on your blog to display your recipe card. It’s a simple process that’s easy enough to become accustomed to.
Conclusion
There are literally hundreds of WordPress food blog themes to choose from, both free and premium. Which one you use won’t impact how tasty your cooking is, but it may provide you with a lot of features that make managing your blog easier.
With Kale Pro, you get access to a user-friendly recipe builder that enables you to share your best dishes with your audience in style. It also features a modern layout and makes it easy for visitors to share your recipes on social media or catch a glimpse of what’s happening on your Instagram feed.
Do you have any questions about Kale Pro or food blogs in general? Ask away in the comments section below!
