Frequently Asked Questions
The questions that come up most. If yours isn't here, drop us a line — we'll answer you and probably add it to this list.
General
What's the difference between free and Pro?
The free theme is a complete, beautiful, fully-functional food blog theme — editorial homepage, navigation, sidebar, all post types, customizer options. It can run a real site indefinitely.
Pro adds five things on top: the Recipe Card Block (with Schema.org markup), four additional homepage layouts beyond Grid, Dark Mode, the Demo Importer, and the Newsletter Widget. Plus automatic updates and priority support.
What hosting do you recommend?
Any decent WordPress host works. We've tested on SiteGround, Cloudways, Kinsta, WP Engine, Hostinger, and DigitalOcean (with a managed WordPress image). The theme has no special requirements — PHP 8.0 or later and roughly 64 MB memory limit.
Does it work with WPML / Polylang / TranslatePress?
Yes. All user-facing strings are properly internationalized via __() and _e(). The text domain is food-recipes for the theme and food-recipes-pro for the plugin. The Recipe Card Block stores its content as block attributes, which any modern translation plugin can handle.
Recipe Card Block
Can I migrate from WP Recipe Maker / Tasty Recipes?
Not automatically — yet. If you have fewer than ~30 recipes, the manual migration is straightforward (open each post, copy ingredients/instructions, paste into Recipe Card). For larger libraries, we recommend exporting your recipes to CSV from your current plugin and contacting support — we can usually script a migration in a few hours.
Can I have multiple recipe cards in one post?
Yes. The block can be inserted as many times as you like. This is useful for things like multi-component recipes (e.g. a salad with separate dressing) where each component has its own ingredients and instructions.
How do I check my Schema is valid?
Use Google's Rich Results Test. Paste your post URL, and Google will tell you whether the recipe markup is valid and eligible for rich results. The Recipe Card Block produces output that passes this test by default.
Performance
What's the page speed like?
The free theme weighs roughly 35 KB CSS and zero JS on the frontend. The Pro plugin adds ~12 KB CSS for the Recipe Card Block (only loaded on posts that use it) and a small JS file for ratings/print. Total typical page weight, after gzip and excluding images, is under 60 KB.
What Lighthouse score should I expect?
On a default install with optimized images, expect 95+ on Performance, 100 on Accessibility, 100 on Best Practices, and 100 on SEO. Your real score depends mostly on your hosting and image sizes — not the theme.
Troubleshooting
For specific errors and fixes, see Troubleshooting.