Cook’d Pro Tutorials

If you have the Feast Plugin, do not follow this tutorial. Go directly to the Feast Plugin Setup.

Demos, FAQs, Tutorials and How-tos for the Cook’d Pro Classic WordPress Theme.

Note: Updating from a previous version to the most recent version is like installing a new theme altogether, requiring customizations to be redone.

Before starting, read the tutorial on How to launch a food blog.

Below are all the tutorials on getting your new theme set up to appear like our demo.

Setup

1.  Install Cook’d Pro Classic with demo content and import widgets
2. How to Configure the Home Page
3. How to Configure the Footer Widgets
4. How to Configure the Recipe Index
   • Alternative: Use a Foodie-Pro-Classic-Style Recipe Index
5. How to Configure the Content Archives
6. How to Add Content to the Category Pages
7. How to Add a Logo
   • Create a logo
8. How to Place Ads in the theme
9. How to Set Up your Navigation Menu
10. How to set up the newsletter
11. Run the Regenerate Thumbnails Advanced plugin from Shortpixel
12. Remove the “website” field from comments to help avoid spam
13. If you’re new to WordPress, take the Yoast FREE WordPress Training course (highly recommended)

Also:

• Cook’d Pro Classic FAQ
• How to Update Cook’d Pro Classic
• Use the Code Snippets Plugin to customize your theme (do not edit theme files)
• How to remove the featured image from posts

After-Setup

• MANDATORY: Review the Google SEO Starter Guide
• Especially the “best practices” and “avoid” tips under each section
• How to add content to the category pages
• Optimize your food blog for search engines
• Expand your functionality with the Feast Plugin!
• How to set a Favicon
• Update your author bio in entry meta (above content)
• Remove the Entry Meta (below content)
• How to use alt text for images (Posts + Pages only)
• How many words to use for image alt text
• Understanding food blog site structure
• Add Google Analytics Tracking
• Use the Code Snippets Plugin to customize your theme (do not edit theme files)

Image sizes you need to know

These are the recommended image sizes you need to know for the theme:

• Featured images: 1200 x 1200 px
  • The featured image is what is used to generate thumbnails for the home page and category pages
• Post content: 720px width minimum (any height is fine)
  • For future proofing, uploading 1200px or 1440px width is a good idea, but this will take up additional disk space on your host
• Pinterest/Social: ask your plugin provider (Tasty Pins, Social Pug)
• Recipe card: ask your plugin provider (WPRM, Tasty Recipes)
• Sidebar: 300px desktop, 360px mobile
• Footer:
  • Full width (mobile): 360px
  • Full width (desktop): 1400px
  • One Half (desktop): 380px

Images for recipe cards, and social platforms are outside the scope of the themes. They require dedicated plugins to manage because of how frequently they’re updated.

How do I write a recipe post?

One of the most frustrating things we hear from bloggers is that their content doesn’t rank well. There’s a lot of reasons for this, but the most prominent is that their content is simply not high enough quality.

We’ve detailed how to write a high quality recipe post in the anatomy of a recipe post, and we highly recommend reviewing the quality rater guidelines for recipe pages.

Customization Tips for Cook’d Pro

Please note that while we’ve added these resources due to the high number of requests that we’ve received that we are unable to troubleshoot issues that arise due to customizations.

• Editing CSS, colors, fonts and whitespaces
• Using Static Images in the Hero Area
• How to Change the Header Size
• Custom Fonts
• Change the Size of the Images on the Recipe Index Page

Cook’d Pro Preview – Make sure you watch to the end to catch new features you won’t see anywhere else!

Version Updates

What’s new in the releases? You can find update notes on the Cook’d Pro theme page.