Starting a food blog can give you a platform to share your favorite dishes and culinary photography. However, you’ll want to be sure your website’s theme can handle the unique requirements of this niche. Between recipes, ads, and text-based posts, your site can quickly become cluttered.
Elara Pro is a lightweight yet feature-packed theme that is perfect for food blogs. It ships with everything you need to create a top-notch online culinary experience for your readers without overwhelming them with a crowded website.
In this post, we’ll review our Elara Pro WordPress theme. In addition to helping you with some basic setup, we’ll dig into some of the features that can help elevate your food blog to Michelin star status. Let’s get started!
An Introduction to Elara Pro
Elara Pro is a beautiful theme designed with food bloggers in mind. Its features include a recipe index as well as recipe card formatting. It also provides several ways to monetize your blog, including built-in ad space and promo boxes.
Elara Pro offers you a lot of flexibility in your blogging. You may want to use video posts to include in-depth tutorials for more difficult cooking techniques. You can also add plenty of photos, including those taken in portrait mode.
Elara Pro has enough customization possibilities to let you showcase your style without overwhelming you with choices. It can be a lot of fun to select fonts and colors to help establish your brand. You can even add a background image, or stick with a solid color if you prefer.
If you’re concerned about the more technical aspects of running a website, Elara Pro comes with plenty of guidance. In addition to its robust documentation, you’ll have access to our expert support team. They can help you get started or troubleshoot any issues you may run into down the road.
There is a one-time setup fee of $39, after which you’ll pay $7.99 per month for continued updates and support. There is also a free version of Elara available, but it lacks some of the food-related features you may want for your blog.
How to Set Up Elara Pro (In 3 Steps)
After you’ve installed Elara Pro, you’re ready to set it up. We’ll give you a quick walkthrough of some of the initial steps.
Step 1: Add Your Logo and Tagline
The first task you’ll probably want to handle is adding your logo and tagline to your website. Do this by navigating to Appearance > Customize in your WordPress dashboard. Then select Site Identity from the options in the left-hand sidebar:
You can use an image or text for your logo, and enter a tagline to appear beneath it. The option to set your favicon is also available from this menu.
If you’d like to change the font of your logo and tagline, navigate to Custom Fonts in the Customizer and toggle on the custom font setting:
You can also change the heading and body fonts if you’d like. These customizations will be applied to the text across your entire blog.
Step 2: Design Your Main Menu
Next, you can design your main navigation menu. This will appear under your logo.
Navigate to Appearance > Menus in your dashboard. Select Create a new menu and assign it to the Main Menu location. If you wish to automatically include new top-level pages as they’re published, select the relevant checkbox. Then click on the Create Menu button:
Now you can add specific categories, pages, posts, or other links to your menu. Under Add Menu Items, navigate to the element you’d like to add, or use the search box:
Check the box next to each item you’d like to add and click on the Add to Menu button. You can reorder the links by dragging and dropping them on the right side of the screen. When you’re finished, click on the Save Menu button.
Step 3: Create Social Media Links
You may also want to set up your social media links so readers can share your site with their friends and follow you on other platforms. To do this, create a new menu and name it “Social”. You must use exactly this name, including capitalization.
Enter each of your social media URLs in the Custom Links field one at a time, clicking on the Add to Menu button between them:
Don’t worry about coming up with link text. Elara Pro will display the appropriate social media icon by default. When you’ve finished adding all of your profiles, click on the Save Menu button.
Elara Pro’s Food Blog Features
Now that you’ve started moving into your new theme, let’s explore the features that make Elara Pro such an excellent fit for food bloggers.
Recipe Index
The Recipe Index template enables you to display a list of all the recipes on your site. You can even organize them by category so your readers can plan full meals.
When you create your Recipe Index page, you’ll be able to select which categories to include using a handy checklist to the right of the editor:
For even more functionality, you can add the optional Search and Filter plugin. This enables you to include tags and dates in the filtering options. Your users may also want to just type their searches into the provided field:
Keep in mind that the Recipe Index was designed for use in the WordPress Classic Editor. If you try to use it with the Block Editor, it may not work correctly.
Recipe Cards
What would a food blog be without recipe cards? Elara Pro’s are nicely laid out with plenty of room for photographs. You can even make them printable so dedicated readers can fill their recipe boxes with their favorite dishes from your site:
Not only are these cards beautiful and easy to read, but they’re also search engine-friendly. Elara Pro’s recipe cards provide structured data to Google, so it will be better able to understand your content and display it appropriately on results pages:
You can display your cards using shortcodes. To build them, begin by clicking on the Recipe Shortcode button in the editor. It’s the one with a carrot icon:
Enter your recipe information into the form. If you’d like to make the card printable, just check the relevant box:
Like the recipe index, the recipe card shortcode builder only works with the Classic Editor. If you try to use the Block Editor, the shortcode button won’t be visible.
Once you’ve included a recipe in a post, you can let your readers leave ratings along with their comments. You can also include a jump to recipe link if there’s an introduction or personal story preceding your recipe card. Clicking on it will bring your visitors directly to the instructions so they can get cooking.
Conclusion
There’s no shortage of options when it comes to food blogging themes. Selecting one that comes with the right tools for the job can help make your site a favorite among online foodies.
Elara Pro has something on the menu for everyone. The Recipe Index and Recipe Cards can help make finding a new signature dish a pleasure for your readers. You’ll likely appreciate the easy setup and flexible layout that our theme offers, too.
Do you have any questions about Elara Pro? Ask us the comments section below!