The Ultimate Foodie Pro Theme Review: Best WordPress Theme For Food Bloggers

Source : The Ultimate Foodie Pro Theme Review: Best WordPress Theme For Food Bloggers
Published On : October 13, 2019 at 10:55AM
By : Ankit Singla

If you’re looking for the best theme for food blogs, your search ends here.

The Foodie Pro WordPress theme is widely regarded as among the best themes by the food blogging community.

But then again, nothing is a one-size-fits-all solution, especially in an industry as intricate as blogging.  

This Foodie Pro theme review will help you determine if it’s the right fit for your website.

Allow me to briefly introduce the star of the show.

---

What is the Foodie Pro Theme?

As the name suggests, the Foodie Pro theme is specifically designed for food bloggers who use WordPress.

Foodie Pro also runs on the Genesis Framework, which has everything you need to build a competitive website with WordPress. It is mobile-responsive, SEO-friendly, secure, and runs like butter regardless of your hosting solution.

It’s also worth noting that the Genesis Framework is trusted by a number of big-name brands across various industries. Below are a few examples of websites that run on premium Genesis child themes:

• Pinch of Yum
• The Budget Mom
• Stephie Cooks
• Spyr Media

In essence, Foodie Pro is a Genesis child theme that takes advantage of the framework’s security, performance, and SEO features.

It also has features tailored to the needs of food bloggers and their food-loving readers.

Allow me to elaborate.

---

What are the Pros of the Foodie Pro Theme?

My blog followers will probably know that this isn’t my first time talking about WordPress themes. 

Over the years, I’ve written a handful of list posts that round up the top WordPress themes for specific niches. 

However, this is the first time I’ve written a full-length review of only one theme. 

This begs the question, what exactly makes the Foodie Pro theme special? 

Why does it deserve its own review instead of being just a number in another listicle?

There are plenty of reasons, actually: 

1. Minimalistic design

Gone are the days of brightly colored web pages laden with Flash animations and videos. 

Nowadays, it’s all about simplicity and readability — eliminating visual clutter to make room for actual, valuable content. 

Those are exactly the qualities Foodie Pro can instill into your website. 

Despite the minimalistic style, Foodie Pro websites still look elegant. This is thanks to the smart utilization of white space and the positioning of widget areas on the theme.

Is the theme too plain for your taste?

Don’t fret — even an absolute WordPress beginner can learn how to customize Foodie Pro within minutes.

2. Adjust the colors of your website’s elements

Want a different background color for your menu? How about choosing another color for buttons whenever users hover their mouse over them?

With a lot of free WordPress themes, the tasks above require you to use custom CSS. But if you have the Foodie Pro theme, all it takes is a few clicks. 

To change the colors of your Foodie Pro theme, expand ‘Appearance’ from the main menu and click ‘Customize.’

On the theme customization page, click ‘Colors.’ This will show you the list of on-page elements that you can set custom colors for.

For example, by clicking ‘Content,’ I can set the color of individual elements like the body text, title, and links. The real-time preview makes sure I know what I’m getting with the color combinations I create.

Keep in mind that this will not only make theme customizations more accessible to beginners. It will also save everyone — veterans and newbies alike — a lot of time when fine-tuning their website’s color scheme. 

If that’s not intuitive enough for you, check out the next feature I’ll discuss. 

3. Find the perfect typography for your food blog

There are a couple of traditional ways to change the fonts on your WordPress website. 

Just like with theme colors, you can always use new fonts with the help of custom CSS. If you want an easier route, you can use WordPress plugins like Easy Google Fonts.

If you want an even easier route, just get Foodie Pro and utilize the built-in typography customization feature. 

There’s no need to mess with code or inflate your WordPress CMS with plugins. Just head to the theme customization page, click ‘Typography,’ and switch things up as you please. 

Apart from applying new fonts, you can also adjust the font’s weight and size. 

Easy, right? 

Being able to customize your theme’s colors and fonts without touching code is a huge plus.

But that’s not all. 

Foodie Pro also lets you quickly and conveniently modify other aspects of the theme.

4. Easily configure other theme settings 

Another theme customization section that’s unique to Foodie Pro is ‘Theme Settings.’

This is where you can configure other parts of your theme with as little coding as possible.

Why don’t we go over the theme settings real quick?

Theme updates

If there’s one thing you need to learn in running a WordPress-powered site, it’s this: 

Always pay attention to updates. 

Be it for a theme, plugin, or the WordPress CMS itself, updates make sure your website is in tip-top shape.

Genesis Framework developer — StudioPress — continues to release updates that improve the stability, functionality, and security of the platform. By ticking the “Check for Updates” checkbox in the ‘Updates’ section, you subject the framework to these periodic upgrades.

Page layouts

The easy-peasy customization doesn’t end with Foodie Pro’s color and typography settings. 

If you know where to look, you can also instantly modify the entire layout of your site.  

This is easy — simply go to ‘Theme Settings’ from the theme customization page and click ‘Site Layout.’

Your options can then be selected and previewed under the “Select Site Layout” drop-down menu. 

Now, I’ll let you explore these layouts yourself once you get your hands on Foodie Pro. WordPress renders a live preview of each layout anyway — you’ll know how it’ll look before you save your changes.

Breadcrumb trails

On a website, the “breadcrumbs” are the series of links that can take readers to higher-level pages. They are typically shown at the top of the page, functioning as a secondary navigation system. 

Websites that implement a hierarchal structure for their content benefit greatly from breadcrumbs.

Suppose a reader arrives at a recipe page and would like to see similar recipes. 

If the site has a breadcrumb trail, readers can easily navigate to the category page and find similar content.

Foodie Pro lets you enable breadcrumbs anywhere on your site with a single click. All you have to do is tick the checkbox of the page where you want them to appear. 

Comments and trackbacks

In a blog, you can think of the comments section as the secret spice that enhances the sense of community. 

They’re a must-have component if you want to maximize engagement and gain valuable feedback from your readers. 

It’s true that you can enable or disable comments on WordPress’s “Discussion” settings page. But it won’t show you an immediate preview of the comments section — unlike Foodie Pro.

On the “Comments and Trackbacks” settings page, you can set the visibility of comments for your site’s posts or pages. 

The preview lets you determine whether or not a comments section looks good with your current color and typography settings. 

Other than the comments, Foodie Pro also lets you control the “trackbacks” feature of your WordPress site. 

In simple terms, trackbacks are signals that notify website owners when another site links to them. This can help bloggers develop relationships and, in some cases, naturally earn backlinks.

As good as it sounds on paper, a lot of website owners disable trackbacks because it propagates spam.   

Content archives

Looking for another way to personalize your food blog?

Foodie Pro lets you adjust the layout of your content archives from the theme settings page. 

If you click on ‘Content Archives,’ you can tweak the layout of your recipe category pages. 

You start by setting the “Archive Grid Display” mode you want to use. This changes the number of content columns on the archive. 

For example, let’s say you want the archive to display three posts in one line. To achieve this effect, you need to select the “One Third” archive grid display mode.

Next, it’s time to choose which parts of your posts can be seen from the archive. The options include the post’s title, upload details, tags, and the content itself.

You can see in the screenshot above that I only selected the posts’ titles to appear. That means I simply have to disable the rest of the options. 

If, however, you want to show each post’s content, at least set a character limit for them. 

Remember that the goal of archive pages is to help readers browse your content categories. That said, your duty is to help them see as many posts as efficiently as possible. 

A hundred characters or less should be enough to give readers an idea of what the post is about.  

Do whatever you want with your archive page — it’s your website, after all. 

You could even hide the featured images of your posts in case you want an old-school, menu-like look. 

I played around with the theme’s typography and attempted this. Here are the results:  

Such a style, however, can be difficult to pull off. It’ll also make it harder for readers to find recipes they’ll like, especially if they aren’t familiar with the cuisine. 

5. Render your site beautifully on mobile devices

The importance of mobile friendliness in a website is something I shouldn’t have to explain by now. 

Get this — mobile web traffic actually surpassed desktop traffic from 2017 to 2018. In 2019, mobile internet still accounts for roughly half of the world’s internet traffic. 

In any case, mobile optimization is something website owners can no longer put in the back burner. 

Fortunately, most modern WordPress themes are built with mobile responsiveness in mind. This pertains to a feature that lets websites automatically rescale, reposition, and adjust elements to accommodate smaller screens. 

Foodie Pro happens to be one of the themes that perfectly support mobile displays through responsive design. 

To preview your site on a smartphone or tablet device, use the buttons at the bottom of the customization page.

Just how mobile-friendly is the Foodie Pro theme?

I’m not going to resort to my own observations to prove this. 

What I’ll do instead is to use Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test and let the results speak for themselves. 

For the test, I used the address of Code2Cook — a food blog that uses the Foodie Pro theme. 

Here’s what the tool has to say:

With a responsive theme like Foodie Pro, mobile users won’t have trouble navigating your site with touch screen controls. Improving their experience, in turn, will also positively affect certain SEO metrics — leading to higher search engine rankings, namely:

• Average session duration 
• Bounce rate
• Pages per session

To learn more about these metrics and on-page SEO in general, check out this post.

6. Seamless recipe plugin support

We’ve now tackled several reasons why Foodie Pro is preferred by countless food bloggers. 

It can help create sites that are fast, customizable, minimalistic, and mobile-friendly — all without writing a single line of code. 

It truly is a WordPress developer’s dream come true.

Let’s now talk about a feature that can take your food blog to the next level. 

Foodie Pro’s design and infrastructure allow for the seamless integration of recipe plugins. 

WP Recipe Maker, for instance, is a pretty awesome one. 

WP Recipe Maker lets food bloggers build professional-looking, visually-appealing recipe pages — zero purchase required. 

Want to see it in action? 

Take a gander at the screenshot below — courtesy of our friends at Code2Cook: 

It looks tricky to make, but the whole process is actually as easy as creating a social media account. Your only job is to input information into the right fields, which are clearly labeled on the main recipe editor. 

Of course, WP Recipe Maker comes with several pre-made templates — all of which blend with the Foodie Pro theme flawlessly. 

I discussed recipe pages in my recent post on how to start a food blog. If you haven’t read that yet, I highly recommend that you do by clicking here.

7. WooCommerce integration

Since Foodie Pro is built with the Genesis Framework, Genesis Connect lets you create a shop section in your blog. 

The plugin integrates WooCommerce — an e-commerce platform for WordPress — into any blog that uses a Genesis child theme. 

This is perfect if you plan to monetize your blog by selling your own products. The same can be said if you want to earn commissions as an affiliate marketer. 

---

What are the Cons of the Foodie Pro Theme?

Alright — I think we’ve covered enough pros to convince a lot of aspiring bloggers to use the Foodie Pro theme. 

While I’m a huge fan of the theme, I have to admit that it’s not without flaws. 

And since it’s my responsibility as a reviewer to be objective, let’s talk about Foodie Pro’s cons.

1. It’s pricey

When you chose WordPress as your content management system, you may have been influenced by your budget. 

Unlike other site-building platforms like SquareSpace and Wix, you can use WordPress without limits for free.

It’s understandable for new bloggers to be cost-conscious, which is why you may be put off by Foodie Pro’s pricing.

To get the theme along with the Genesis Framework package, you need to spend an upfront cost of $129.95. 

That’s not exactly cheap. 

You can say that the price is justified by all the value you can get out of Foodie Pro. However, that doesn’t negate the fact that it’s expensive. 

2. Your site may look similar to a lot of competitors

The popularity of Foodie Pro is a double-edged sword. 

On the plus side, you can be confident that it’s a premium theme built to compete against authoritative sites. Furthermore, more sales for StudioPress also translates to more funds for the theme’s ongoing development. 

The drawback is, your website may have tons of lookalikes without extensive customizations on your end.

Sure, the Foodie Pro customization part is easy, but it will probably still require hours of effort.

3. It will still be difficult to change how your site will look on mobile devices

Modifying the appearance of your website on desktop browsers is a breeze with Foodie Pro.

Styling your recipe page for mobile devices, however, won’t be as effortless.

The colors, typography, and content visuals may carry over to your site in responsive mode. But if you want customized mobile experiences, like custom menus and swipe-friendly content cards, you’ll need a professional developer’s assistance.

To be fair, that is the case with most WordPress themes with mobile responsiveness baked into them. It’s still worth a mention in order to keep your expectations realistic.

$129.95 for a Theme? Can I Make it Cheaper?

As I stated above, the price of the Foodie Pro theme along with the Genesis Framework package is $129.95. 

However, if you already own the Genesis Framework, then you only need to pay $56 for the theme. 

The Genesis Framework costs $59.95 if you purchase it separately. That means you only have to pay a total of $115.95 to download and use the Foodie Pro theme.

Click here to learn more about the Genesis Framework and how to take advantage of this deal.

Also, take note that there’s a live Foodie Pro demo on their StudioPress page. 

I’ve linked to that page at the beginning of this post. Be sure to check that out while you’re at it.

Conclusion

That concludes my review of the Foodie Pro theme.

It is, without a doubt, highly recommended for food bloggers who want to be relevant in their niche. The theme is fast, elegant, beginner-friendly, SEO-friendly, and mobile responsive — everything you need to build a solid foundation for blogging.

If you already purchased Foodie Pro and spent some time with it, I’d love to hear about your experience.

The comments section below is always open for your feedback and suggestions. 

Cheers!

---

You Might Also Like:

• How to Install the Genesis Framework and Child Themes on WP Blog?
• Thrive Themes vs Genesis Themes – Detailed Comparison
• 11 Best Genesis Child Themes for Bloggers

The post The Ultimate Foodie Pro Theme Review: Best WordPress Theme For Food Bloggers appeared first on Master Blogging.

For More Go to : Master Blogging