Most food and recipe blogs on the internet today use Wordpress, the web's most popular content management platform. While Wordpress provides a ton of great features and content tools for managing your recipes and blog; it comes with a myriad of downsides as well, including security issues and vulnerabilities, sometimes slow website loading speed, and other negatives.
Wordpress has been the king of the web for years now, and rightfully so. It made blogging easy. Over the past years though, new platforms like Ghost, Wix, Squarespace, and Webflow have popped up, challenging Wordpress for easy to use content management & website development.
While all these platforms provide their own pros and cons, one has slipped under the radar for food bloggers and recipe websites - Shopify.
You probably know Shopify has an e-commerce platform, and it is exactly that. Shopify provides a fantastic base system for selling your own products, managing customers, shipping, inventory, all while having an incredibly easy to use content management system included as well.
But recently, with more and more people looking to bring their physical goods stores online, Shopify has been growing it's platform to better support niche food brands, grocery stores, and food blogs.
E-commerce + Recipes = Win Win
First off, using Shopify as your recipe website platform is mostly a good idea for people that have a product to sell. Shopify excels at e-commerce, so if you don't have anything to sell, you may be better off looking at other platforms like Wix, Wordpress, or Ghost.
If you sell a physical food item, Shopify is truly the best opportunity for you to both gain consistent readers / users, while selling more of your product.
Using Shopify for your recipe blog is a smart call as you are able to not only attract customers to your website via your delicious recipes, but also take advantage of the time they spend on your website by pitching and selling them your recipe's ingredients.
Using a Shopify app like Recipe Kit, you can:
- Create beautiful recipes with gorgeous designs that live in your Shopify website blog
- Attach your products as ingredients so that customers can one-click buy them while reading the product
- Provide Google with all the lovely SEO optimized rich data schema, so your recipes show up high in search results while displaying information like the recipe image, calories, cooking time, etc.
This truly is the best scenario for both food blog owners, and recipe readers alike. Readers get to read your delicious recipe, and they have the easy opportunity to purchase your product from within the recipe card so that they receive the exact products that the recipe was built using.
Shopify Is Investing In Content
Years ago, when Shopify first launched, the platform was missing some critical features for store owners that wanted to create content to compete with blogs and websites built on extensive CMS platforms like Wordpress.
Recently, with the introduction of Shopify's OS2.0 platform, Shopify stores can now take advantage of a detailed drag-and-drop editor which allows them to build better looking, and more full featured, pages and blogs posts.
Embedding photo galleries, recipe cards, featured products, and more, are now possible with Shopify's upgraded editor.
Each and every new update from Shopify shows them moving towards building a platform that allows store owners & bloggers to build a e-commerce website that not only features slick product purchasing & checkout options, but also a easily customizable content-heavy blog.