Which WordPress theme should you use for a recipe blog, and how do you set it up?

Last updated: October 30, 2026

In short: For a recipe blog, pick a block theme with recipe cards, category pages and a printable recipe page, and leave recipe schema to a separate recipe plugin. Wiozen Theme has a Food design for this: upload and activate the theme as a zip, connect the site to your Wiozen account and choose Food on the Designs tab. With the demo content the site opens with 26 recipes in 5 categories; you then add your own recipes and remove the demo with one click.

What should a recipe blog theme have?

On a recipe site, readers look at the photo first and the ingredient list second. Look for:

• Recipe cards and category pages that show photos large.
• A front page that can show soups, desserts, baking and so on as separate sections.
• A plain recipe page that reads well on a phone in the kitchen, and a print view that comes out cleanly on paper.
• Pages that load fast and don't pull fonts from another server.

Recipe cards that show cooking time and ratings in search results need Recipe structured data. A recipe plugin produces that, not the theme; there's more on this below.

What's in Wiozen Theme's Food design?

Wiozen Theme is a free block theme with five ready designs. Food is one of them: a recipe magazine look on cream paper. Its default front page shows, in order:

• "Recipe of the week": the latest recipe alone with a large image.
• Round category stories, up to 10.
• "Latest recipes": a 4-column grid.
• "Quick recipes": 3 recipes carrying the tag with the slug quick.
• A mosaic of 5 recipes from the desserts category.
• "From the recipe box": three columns for soups, mains and pastries.
• "All recipes": a paged list with small images.

The columns look for categories with the slugs soups, mains, desserts and pastries. If your site has none with those slugs, your categories with the most posts are used instead, so the front page isn't empty when your categories have other names.

Food has its own module looks: a 2, 3 or 4 column grid, a timeline and a feed with small images, a two-column layout and a single recipe lead. Categories get colors automatically from the design's palette of eight. Dark mode works in this design too.

Headings are set in Fraunces and body text in Karla. Both fonts ship inside the theme and load from your own server; both are licensed under the SIL Open Font License (OFL).

Install the theme and pick the Food design

1. Make sure you have WordPress 6.6 and PHP 7.4 or newer. Under Settings › Permalinks choose "Post name" so recipe URLs are built from the title.
2. Download Wiozen Theme, then install the zip under Appearance › Themes › Add New › Upload Theme and activate it.
3. Under Appearance › Wiozen Theme, click "Connect Wiozen" and approve the site with your Wiozen account.
4. On the Designs tab, choose Food.
5. On the Demo content tab, click "Add demo content" to see the layout filled in.

The panel and automatic updates need at least $5 in total top-ups on the account; the balance stays yours and is spent in Wiozen apps. Picking a design happens in this panel. If you don't connect, the site, the Site Editor and your posts still work, but the theme stays on the default News design.

Demo recipes and photo licences

The demo content adds 26 recipes across 5 categories (Soups, Mains, Desserts, Pastries, Salads). If the site language is Turkish the recipes come in Turkish, otherwise in English. Every recipe has "Ingredients" and "Method" headings, a bulleted ingredient list, numbered steps and a tip, which works as a model for writing your own.

All 26 photos come from Wikimedia Commons: 24 under CC0 1.0 and 2 in the public domain. Each photo's title, author and source URL are listed in the theme's designs/food/demo/CREDITS.txt file. Even so, the demo is meant to come off before you launch: one button on the Demo content tab removes the demo posts, pages, images and menu and leaves what you wrote alone.

The recipe page and the "Print recipe" button

In the Food design every recipe has a "Print recipe" button at the top. When printing, the header, footer, ads, tags, author box, related recipes and comments are hidden.

The button prints only the H2 sections of the recipe that contain a list or a table; intro paragraphs, the featured image and the byline stay off the page. So write ingredients and steps with a List block under an H2 heading ("Ingredients", "Method"). If there's no such section, the whole post is printed.

The time shown on a recipe page is reading time, not cooking time. The theme has no fields for cooking time, servings or calories.

What do you need for Recipe schema?

Wiozen Theme doesn't output Recipe structured data. For search engines to read cooking time, servings or ratings, install a recipe plugin that asks for those fields and write recipes with its block. The theme leaves this job to the plugin, so your recipe data stays if you change themes.

Beyond that, an SEO plugin (for meta descriptions and the sitemap), a caching plugin and a backup plugin are enough.

Arrange the front page around your recipes

On the Customize tab the front page is built from modules: you can add up to 20, reorder them and hide them. Each module takes its posts from the latest posts, a category, a tag or the most commented.

The "Quick recipes" module looks for the tag with the slug quick. Give your fast recipes a tag with that slug, or switch the module's source to your own tag. If you'll run ads, the Ad slots tab has ready places, and the default Food front page already has two ad modules, one for desktop and one for phones.

Frequently asked questions

For your recipe blog, download Wiozen Theme for free and try the Food design with the demo recipes on your own site.