Craft and monetize a beautiful recipe site
Recipe.Site allows anyone to easily build beautiful, feature-rich, SEO optimized recipe sites with photos, videos, structured content, the latest recipe features, and more.
We are also working on tools that help you monetize your site, like subscriptions, high-quality ads, affiliate partnerships & links, and paywalled content.
Our three main goals
Publishing a recipe should be as easy as typing it out, dropping in some photos and videos, and clicking Publish. The tension, however, is that recipe data is most useful when it’s structured — this is what allows the recipe to be doubled, converted to the metric system, optimized for SEO, searchable, and more.
Traditional recipe publishing experiences put the burden on the creator to structure the recipe data, which results in endless input boxes and dropdown menus. It can take over an hour just to publish a single recipe!
Our aim is to make the most simple publishing experience. You just write plain text, and the software recognizes ingredients, measurements, temperatures, and equipment automatically, tagging and structuring your recipe data in the background. And you don't need to hire a developer to configure plugins, themes, etc.
At the end of the day the whole point of Recipe.Site is to make it easier for people to cook food that makes them happy. By improving the recipe layouts, and the experience of following a recipe, we believe we can make it easier for people to scan, evaluate, prep, and cook. Hopefully make cooking a little bit more accessible, a little bit smoother.
This doesn’t mean reinventing what recipes look like. It means taking the best patterns that already exist, and making them available to anyone who wants to publish recipes. It means actively listening to at-home cooks, and continually iterating towards better experiences. Small features, like the ability to substitute ingredients, toggle between beginner and advanced modes, add notes, or have a hands-free experience, can go a long way.
While nobody loves display ads and popups, it’s important to recognize why these things exist: creators need to make money. So for Recipe.Site, revenue for creators is absolutely key to success.
We are collaborating closely with the first group of creators on the platform to build different monetization tools and features that aren’t so disruptive to the user experience. We are experimenting with subscriptions, affiliate integrations, paywalled/premium content, direct ad deals, and more.
For each creator, the monetization strategy and tools that make sense will depend on their goals and the size of their audience. The aim is for Recipe.Site to be flexible so that creators can use it in the way that makes the most sense for them.
Recipe.Site is for anyone who wants to create a website with beautiful, easy-to-follow recipes...
- ✶ Recipe & food content creators/bloggers (professionals & amateurs)
- ✶ Restaurants & food trucks
- ✶ Recipe book publishers
- ✶ Food companies
- ✶ Farms & producers
- ✶ Personal use
Key features
Ultralight recipe entry and publishing flow
Optimized video, photo, and rich-media support
Monetization features: ads, affiliate links, memberships and subscriptions, etc.
Custom domains & hosting
State of the art SEO, site speed, and analytics
Modern recipe utilities & components: cook mode, timers, conversion, portions
Mobile-first approach
Beautiful templates & CSS customization
Social media integrations (Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest, YouTube, etc.)
Allow your audience to: save recipes, add notes, make their own variations, etc.
Plus comments, ratings, search, categories, and all of the other standard features
A letter to recipe creators
Hey, I’m Alex. I’ve been designing and building websites & software for the past 12 years. Most recently I led the 2023 Wikipedia redesign. I also love to cook (lately lots of Detroit-style pizza). Over the years I've found so many good recipes online, so I am very grateful to all of you.
So much wonderful recipe content is being published on social media sites these days, but having a website is still important. Recipes on a website are easier for people to cook at home. And a website is something you own — your little piece of the internet, a permanent home for your recipes, a clear expression of your brand, enabling deeper connections with your followers.
So what are your options? WordPress is the most popular, which makes sense. There are recipe plugins, a big developer community, and tools for monetization. There’s also Substack, SquareSpace, and other platforms that offer great features. Which brings us to the main question: is there a need for a website platform specifically built for recipe content?
I think that a platform designed and engineered around ingredients, measurements, instructions, timing, versions/variations, substitutes, diets, and more could offer a number of advantages. Advantages in terms of ease of use for you, ease of use for people cooking your recipes at home, and advantages in terms of monetization opportunities. So that is what we’re exploring.
We’re at the beginning of this journey, aiming to improve the experience for creators and home cooks. I hope that some of you choose to join us. Below are a bunch of loose thoughts that might help guide/shape our explorations:
- Writing, editing, and publishing recipes should be easy and yield beautiful results. You should feel proud and happy with your published recipes, and confident with the CMS that they exist within. It shouldn’t be a maze of form fields and confusing technology.
- You should be empowered to customize, control, and superpower your site without needing to hire developers or designers.
- The people who cook your recipes should benefit as well. Recipes should be easier to scan, understand, and follow. People should have the option to save, share, and customize them. Maybe they could be configurable, so people can try different options, substitutes, and variations.
- I also hope the ease of use encourages new people to publish recipes online. Including restaurants, farms, food companies, etc. More voices, more cuisines, more diversity.
- Revenue for creators is key. Recipe.Site must enable you with a variety of tools for income. Traditional tools like ads, and newer strategies like memberships, affiliate integrations, and out-of-the-box ideas that can widen the toolset. My hope is that by cultivating an experimental community and great technology, we can figure out which strategies and technologies allow you to generate more revenue than you do currently.
About us
Recipe.Site is being designed and built by Alex Hollender and Conor Davidson, in New York City.
Alex and Conor both have many years of experience designing and building web apps & software, and love to cook. In the recent past Alex led the 2023 redesign of Wikipedia, and Conor co-founded and built Gentle Guide.
We are in the early stages of exploration. If you're interested in learning more about the project we'd love to hear from you: alex@recipe.site
