Creating a Recipe Index

Tracking recipes is essential for every food blog. It offers a place for your culinary history, and it allows your readers to access them at any time easily.

That’s why we created the Recipe Index — a template page that is fully customizable and allows you to display all your recipes and enables visitors to filter through them.

How do Templates work?

A template is a starter layout with numerous areas where you can add your content. In the Recipe Index template, each area is called a Widget area and can hold widgets such as Featured Posts, Calendar, Categories, etc. For example, the Recipe Index on our Julia demo is built with the Recipe Index template. Here are the Widget areas that you can find:

  1. Archive Content: by using our Featured Posts widgets, you can add the categories that are important to showcase on the Recipe Index;
  2. Sidebar: this area is the general Sidebar area for the rest of the website;
  3. Default search widget: so that browsing through your recipes is as easy as possible.

Set up the Recipe Index Template

Now that we’ve made it clear what a template is and how you can use it in this particular theme let’s move next and set it up.

  • Log in to the WordPress Dashboard;
  • Create a new page, and give it a name like “Recipes Index”, for instance;
  • Go to the Page Attributes section, open the Template drop-down menu;
  • Select the Archive Index option. Here’s a screenshot with more details;
  • Click Update, and you’re done.

How to add widgets?

Now that we have our page set up, it’s time to add relevant widgets to the page. Here’s what you need to do:

  • Load the recently created Recipe Index page and from the top toolbar (the black bar at the top), and on Customize;
  • Navigate to the Widgets section and choose the Archive Index widget area;
  • Click on the Add a Widget button and select any widget that you would like to add.

If you want to learn more about our custom widgets, you can dig deeper right here.

Tips and tricks

To improve the recipe searching experience, you can use the Jetpack Visibility feature to easily organize your sidebar widgets depending on what pages you want them to show up.

The Recipe Index on our demo is a good example. We customized our Sidebar area so that some menus are displayed only on the Recipe Index, categories pages, and search pages. This way, your readers can browse through your recipes without going back and forth between the Recipe Index and the search results page.

Here’s how you can do it:

  1. Make sure you have the Jetpack plugin installed and activated;
  2. From your WordPress Dashboard, go to Jetpack → Settings → Appearance and enable Widget Visibility module;
  3. Go to Appearance → Customize → Widgets → Sidebar and add the widgets you would like to display only on the Recipe Index. For the moment, they will appear at the end of the already existing widgets;
  4. Click on the widgets you don’t want to show on the Recipe Index. In the bottom right corner, you will see the Visibility button. Click it and from the first drop-down, select the Hide option and choose the type of web pages where you should hide your widget. The last field tells you which specific page you would like to hide the widget from. Select them accordingly to your needs. The options will be automatically saved;
  5. Visit the Recipe Index page, and you will see that the widgets you selected will not display in the Sidebar.

Now, you can edit the widgets you want to be visible only on the Recipe Index. All you have to do is repeat the fourth step from the above list and make sure that you replace Hide with Show in the first drop-down.

Looking for a food blogging WordPress theme?

Julia, our theme, comes packed with a recipe index, customizable home page, Gutenberg support and more.

Check out Julia
Updated on April 29, 2021

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