Today we are excited to announce the next major update to our WordPress recipe plugin, Simmer Pro Recipes 2.0. The new version overhauls a ton of fantastic recipe UI and UX.
With this plugin, recipes adapt to any WordPress theme beautifully, with lightning fast code and responsive design. Recording recipes with Simmer Pro doesn’t require a fancy theme or confusing framework just to get off the ground. Instead, this plugin maximizes recipe SEO and pushes speed to peak performance by default. The only requirement is a license key connecting your subscription and site to automatic updates.
Simmer Pro was created to get anyone recipe blogging in minutes. The best part? Technical skills aren’t even a requirement for publishing beautiful recipes or running this plugin.
High-quality code and consistency
Great design is universal and unifying to most people. It connects a person to a message through symbolism, text, or another creative expression. No other communication can articulate meaning as quickly or through as many language barriers.
So how does great design and high-quality code make it into your recipes? Well, while the majority of design can evoke positive emotions and sentiments, bad design can ruin your chance at making any money, or worse, might actually harm customers.
The makers of Simmer Pro have thought a lot about the effects of great design on your website, and have integrated the most valuable parts into this plugin. Unlike other recipe tools or plugins, Simmer doesn’t embed clunky, raw HTML for ingredients or instructions. Instead, each line in a recipe is correctly parsed and accurately standardized for easy machine and human learning. On the backend side, creators can flexibly input ingredient or instruction line, each automatically drag-and-drop ready to re-order and remix lines easily. Simmer Pro gets rid of the guesswork of regular recipe blogging, plugins, and themes with impossible instructions or interfaces. Instead of jumbled recipe designs, Simmer Pro formats recipes beautifully and gets recipes done right.
Producing professional recipes using high-quality technology allows your brand to find new respect. This respect (or not) translates directly into brand reputation, and your cash flow. Better quality technology for each part of your WordPress site also means your customers are better protected from security risks.
Consistency and professionalism subjectively define high-quality content and design. In this way, Simmer plugins and products are different from any other WordPress plugin available today.
After activating this plugin, visitors to recipes can expect a consistent experience across all formats. Simmer Pro is the only WordPress recipe plugin with recipe cards alongside taxonomy and individual recipe discoverability. Developers can also check out our easy-to-understand tech documentation. Optional settings you can change to maximize this experience include:
- Recipe categories and category library filter
- Useful settings under Settings > Simmer in your WordPress dashboard
- Recipe template customization options
The positive impact of your website’s user experience on UX and SEO is easily quantifiable when you use Simmer Pro Recipes, discussed below.
After activating this plugin with any high-quality WordPress theme, a consistent UX is applied for recipes, building SEO and actual human trust.
Backup before changes
Before making changes to any WordPress site, you should have multiple backups of your site’s database and files. Make sure to test your most recent copy so you can reliably restore it in case of errors.
Staging environments that copy your site can be useful during this process. Another solution are secure and reliable paid services like VaultPress.
Nutrition API and control
Control is the core theme component behind our thinking for the latest additions to Simmer Pro complete nutrition. The manual calculation of this section avoids uncertain, 3rd-party algorithms and allows recipe creators to directly input and control nutrition data themselves.
On the front-end of your website and recipes, this enhanced Nutrition API ignores the clunky, black-and-white food facts chart used for most U.S. labeling for the last 50 years, replacing it with a nutrition section with nutrition fact measurements any recipe creator can control.
By default, nutrition appears below recipe instructions. The output of each nutrition fact also includes helper classes to make customization for those who need it faster. Need help with recipe customization, such as changing the order or layout of nutrition and other recipe details? Simmer Pro support is happy to help.
In addition to all important micro and macronutrients, the Nutrition API adds new recipe schema.
- Cooking Method Suggestions to input this field include Frying, Baking, Roasting, Steaming, or other cooking method verbs. This field is output in the nutrition section.
- Cuisine is another new standardized label for Google Structured Data recipe search results, either for the nationality or another unique identifier. This field is output in the details section at the top of recipes.
To use these fields activate Simmer Pro. Want to level up recipe schema to the next level with a developer? Try these testing tools for Google and Pinterest recipes.
New minimalist, always responsive design
Modern, crisp aesthetics set the design and professional tone of Simmer Pro 2.0 and above. The central design updates primarily introduce the new Nutrition API in addition to a two-column, always responsive list of ingredients next to instructions.
Better UX in two columns
Today’s high resolution, retina, and large display screen formats define wider recipe ser experience or UX as the new norm. To take advantage of this new white space, recipes are balanced in a full-width recipe layout as the default Simmer Pro Recipe design. Ingredients are on the left with instructions on the right in two columns.
This delightful UX uses contemporary responsive design technology, optimizing your site for 2018 and beyond. When combined with a high-quality WordPress theme, Simmer Pro always adapts use your site using the same smart, responsive technology to split ingredients and instructions. Viewed on mobile screen sizes, these two columns transform into a single column for easy scrolling. Changing the position or width of this responsive design is easy if you add custom CSS in your theme Customizer.
Simmer Pro also adds simple color-pickers for customizing recipe text and recipe highlight color (card and detail background highlight coloring). To edit these options, go to Settings > Simmer in your WordPress dashboard.
This plugin adds only the design essentials required for consistent recipe styling. The default design is easily customized with an action hook and filter system. A simple template file override system is also available to developers who need it, and our support team is happy to help.
How UX and SEO are essential to recipes
Search engine optimization or SEO is defined as many different marketing, content, and technology methodologies, tools, platforms, and best practices combined. The umbrella of this work is vast and extremely general. However, one area is especially revealing and has an impact on SEO, and that is user experience or UX. Out of all the possible SEO investments, a website can make, a high-quality UX is the best indicator a site will rise in rankings over time.
One way to calculate the effect of UX on SEO is by measuring the impact of changes to your site to your SEO and social search ranking. Your ranking relies heavily on high-quality UX to set your rankings.
User experience is just one of the many quantifiable factors used to grow search rankings on a site. To quantify the impact of UX on SEO, use the following metrics to track your search ranking strategy.
Metrics that Matter
- Speed and page load times
- Clearly defined calls to action
- Supporting sales funnels from other platforms
- Analytics to track all actions
- Design quality
- Engineering quality
- Overall sense of accomplishment target felt by a target visitor
As a new business or blog, getting search engine optimization metrics right can be a challenge. Simmer Pro removes the confusion and includes everything you need for recipe SEO in a single plugin.
Simple skip to recipe button
If you have been blogging your recipes long enough, chances are you have stumbled on a tweet like this one. To save your new and returning visitors loads of scroll time, the new skip-to-recipe button can be dropped into any blog post or recipe description with a simple shortcode.
Dear Food Bloggers,
I just want the recipe.
❤️ Me
— Gretchen (@lifenut) September 22, 2017
To use the shortcode, type skip-to-recipe inside brackets anywhere in content. The skip-to-recipe button is compatible with any theme. For custom styling, you can even add custom styling with the CSS class .simmer-skip-to-recipe. See an example of this button in this sample blog post.
People who discover recipes in search like Google or even Pinterest usually want to read a recipe immediately. Long recipe descriptions can be valuable to some of your visitors, but not all of them. The Simmer Pro skip button allows everyone to get what they want when they want it. How simple is that?
Recipe toolbox prioritized
In this newest release, prioritization of the recipe toolbox has moved to the top of the design. Sharing, saving, rating and so many other incredibly useful tools for recipes are possible with Simmer Pro now have a stronger focus than ever.
By default, Simmer Pro recipe toolboxes include recipe printing as the first action. To take this toolbox one step further, add any of the widely available and reliably maintained WordPress plugins for content actions like ratings or saving. Use this method to add recipe ratings, recipe saving, shopping list or mealplan actions. This method also ensures your UX and SEO is as accurate as possible, with each plugin focusing on a specific piece of code or technology rather than haphazardly combined. Recipes with this plugin are automatically formatted for clipping, collecting, and making lists for consumer recipe services like Yummly, too.
The recipe toolbox creates long-term connections for both new and returning visitors. From saving to rating or printing, these actions let website creators and developers build experiences that keep visitors returning.
Customizing the Simmer Pro recipe toolbox is super easy if you want to add your own styling. Just use the CSS class .simmer-recipe-print-tool. Need help customizing? Our support staff is happy to provide unlimited help.
Recipe ratings
We have a few favorite plugins that we have used over the years–some as early as 2004!–for websites of all shapes and sizes. For ratings on any content including Simmer Pro Recipes, we recommend Comment Rating Field Pro by WPZinc. Comment Rating Field Pro is one of the many official integrations available for Simmer Pro Recipes. Using multiple plugins to achieve recipes and ratings will give your site better code quality and SEO. Plus, when one small factor can affect your ratings, everything counts.
Comment Rating Field Pro or any other ratings plugin is combined with recipes simply by adding the code snippets found in your plugin instructions to the Simmer Pro recipe template. You or a developer can do this easily with multiple techniques.
- Use the built-in filter and action hook system in Simmer Pro by adding the
simmer_recipe_toolsandsimmer_recipe_tools_embeddedactions to yourfunctions.phpfile. - Or, use the simple file replacement for your WordPress theme built into Simmer Pro. To do this, take a copy of
recipe.phporshortcode-recipe.phpfrom the plugin and paste it into your active WordPress theme. This new file will override the default recipe template.
New integrations are added all the time, and you can request new ones from support. Need help? Our support staff is happy to assist you.
Bug fixes and compatibility
Website building is an extremely dynamic process that is always changing. This recipe plugin packs in tons of power to your site because of its adaptability. Simmer Pro matches the fast-changing pace of website building with incredible innovation, craft, and design. Our team tracks new technology for your recipes, bugs, and any other relevant industry shifts so you’re always one step ahead. We are continually testing this plugin and encourage you to contribute bug reports anytime through support.
Yoast 5.0+ compatibility
Simmer Pro 2.0 adds compatibility for saving content with recipe shortcodes while Yoast SEO 5.0+ is activated. This bug fix repairs a PHP error created by this plugin conflict, found when updating and saving post content with recipe shortcodes.
Even more developer goodies
This update includes in tons of goodies for developers, packaged into each new feature. A set of new nutrition functions in this latest release builds the Nutrition API to its most powerful version yet.
The biggest for developers is the enhanced Nutrition API. The latest additions mean you can use any of the endpoints created for complete nutrition in your web or application design. Here’s how to find the functions.
Nutrition API additions
One of the greatest value-adds for businesses when you buy this plugin is the inline documentation any developer can use.
To find the inline instructions hidden in the new Nutrition API, simply open up a copy of the plugin and navigate to /core/recipes/template-functions.php. Open this file to use the complete Nutrition API in your own custom code. Customize your theme, or develop an entirely new, RESTful mobile app for itemized nutrition.
Gutenberg support in 2018
Gutenberg is the hotly anticipated content editor update coming to WordPress in 2018. The project packs a major UX and backend overhaul for the content editor. Still in early beta, the planned release still needs a lot of upcoming testing. Although most of the changes for Gutenberg will show up in your WordPress dashboard backend, the project also adds exciting new functionality to the front-end of content.
Compatibility with Gutenberg will continue to be added to Simmer Pro throughout 2018 before the project reaches a major public release. There will be some exciting changes to the existing action and filter hook systems to create new possibilities for recipes in custom applications.
Connect your site to Simmer for automatic updates
When you buy this recipe plugin you aren’t just getting a download. Customers receive a license subscription for their site to connect directly to automatic future updates and support access. You can also manage you active sites and subscriptions from your Simmer account.
After activating your license key, your site will have automatic access to updates. To activate your Simmer Pro license key, input a license key and billing email. After pressing Save Changes, confirmation will appear displaying the total number of activations remaining.
After successfully activating the plugin go to Recipes > Add New in your WordPress dashboard to get started. If you want to make customizations, go to Settings > Simmer for optional settings.
If your subscription stays active, then your site will always get an automatic copy of the latest code and updates for this plugin.
The premium support included with every key makes sure you can always get professional help. If something goes wrong, or if you want to make changes you’re unable to fix or not sure about, just send us a message and we will be happy to assist.
Our customers love us
This recipe plugin saves our customers an incredible amount of time and money. Expenses like marketing, product development, or even customer support can be optimized with this plugin. To keep startup costs controlled, new eCommerce sites to food blogs can leverage the value added by this plugin to any WordPress install.
Over 1,000 hours of development were poured into this latest release, including extensive testing across tons of potential WordPress theme and plugin combinations. Even with the single site license, you’ll have access to the complete power baked into this plugin.
How to get started
You can start building recipes right now with this plugin. Here’s how.
- Choose your plugin license.
- Download and install Simmer Pro in the plugins section of your WordPress dashboard.
- Activate the plugin and activate your license key to connect your site to your Simmer subscription.
That’s it! You can immediately begin adding recipes from the Recipes > Add New included in your WordPress dashboard. Sit back and enjoy your new food blog, or add some optional extensions and customizations.
With all of these features and optimized code, this plugin is the perfect out-of-box answer for any blog, site, or app that needs the best web UX for recipes and their customers. We are so confident you’ll love this plugin as much as our current customers that we provide a 15-day refund period. If you install the plugin and aren’t absolutely satisfied with your purchase, just message support for a full refund.
Need more reasons to build your site with this plugin? When you get a Simmer product, you are getting the highest-quality code possible for WordPress, period. Your site’s security and performance are just as important to us as they are to you. Gain peace of mind, trust, and security in the quality of your site and your customers’ experience with this product and many others.