Looking for a way to boost engagement on your food blog? Use Recipe Rich Pins.
More and more people use Pinterest to discover recipes and meal ideas instead of flipping through a hefty cookbook. The platform makes it easy to view ingredients, cook times, and ratings in a visually attractive format that’s much more engaging than plain text — and Recipe Rich Pins take that experience to the next level.
The good news: with the right plugin, getting Recipe Rich Pins on your food blog is completely automatic. There’s no application, no validator, no manual setup — and we’ll explain exactly how it works in this post.
What are Pinterest Rich Pins?
Pinterest uses “Pins” as the saveable, shareable posts that link back to a page on the web. Rich Pins are an enhanced version of standard Pins that automatically display extra information pulled from your website — directly on the Pin itself.
The result is a more detailed, more clickable Pin that stands out in the Pinterest feed and gives users useful context before they even click through to your site.
Pinterest currently supports three types of Rich Pins:
- Article Rich Pins — designed for blog posts. They display the title, description, publish date, and (in some cases) the author of the post.
- Recipe Rich Pins — every food blogger’s bread and butter. They display the recipe’s title, cook time, servings, star rating, and ingredient list right on the Pin. (The exact information shown depends on the recipe card plugin you use to generate the underlying schema.)
- Product Rich Pins — for ecommerce. They display the product’s real-time price, stock availability, and a direct buy-it button.
What are the advantages of Recipe Rich Pins?
While there are other types of Rich Pins, Recipe Rich Pins are by far the most valuable format for food bloggers. Here’s why:
#1: More information on the Pin itself
Compared to a standard Pin (image + title only), Recipe Rich Pins surface the details that matter most to a hungry Pinterest user: cook time, servings, star rating, and the full ingredient list. This makes your recipes look more professional in the feed and helps users decide whether your recipe is the right one for them — before they ever click.
#2: Higher click-through rates
Because Rich Pins display so much useful information directly in the feed, they consistently outperform standard Pins on click-through. A user who sees “30 min · 4 servings · 4.8 stars · uses garlic, lemon, brown butter” is far more likely to tap through to your recipe than someone scrolling past a plain title.
#3: Enhanced SEO (the same data powers Google too)
The structured data that powers Recipe Rich Pins is the same Recipe schema that powers Google’s Recipe rich results. So adding it to your site does double duty — better Pinterest performance and better Google performance — from a single piece of markup.
#4: Stronger branding
Rich Pins display your site’s name and favicon prominently, giving visitors a clear sense of who created the recipe. Over time, repeated exposure builds brand recognition — every time someone saves your Pin, your brand travels with it across Pinterest.
#5: Automatic updates
If you update a recipe on your site — change an ingredient, fix a cook time, tweak the title — Pinterest re-scrapes the page and automatically updates the corresponding Rich Pins. There’s no need to recreate or re-pin anything. Your Pinterest content stays in sync with your blog automatically.
What do you need to enable Recipe Rich Pins?
Less than you might think. Pinterest used to require website validation through a “Rich Pins Validator” tool and a manual application process — but that’s no longer the case. Pinterest has retired the Rich Pin Validator and now detects Rich Pin–eligible pages automatically. As soon as your recipe pages contain valid Recipe structured data, Pinterest will start serving Rich Pins for them within a day or so.
So the entire requirement boils down to this: your recipe pages need to contain valid schema.org/Recipe structured data. That’s what Pinterest reads to populate Rich Pins.
The easiest way to generate that schema on a WordPress food blog is with a recipe card plugin like Recipe Card Blocks:
Recipe Card Blocks automatically outputs complete, valid Recipe schema for every recipe you create — title, ingredients, instructions, prep and cook times, servings, nutrition, and ratings. Once you publish a recipe with the plugin, the data Pinterest needs is already there. No extra setup, no validator, no application.
Do you need a Pinterest Business account? Not strictly — Rich Pins themselves work for any Pin that links to a properly marked-up recipe page. But a Business account is free and gives you valuable extras (analytics, ad tools, audience insights), so most food bloggers benefit from upgrading. You can convert your existing account to Business in a couple of clicks.
How to set up Recipe Rich Pins for your food blog
The full setup is just two steps: install Recipe Card Blocks and create recipes with it. That’s it.
Step #1: Install Recipe Card Blocks
Recipe Rich Pins work with both the free and premium versions of Recipe Card Blocks.
The free version can be installed directly from your WordPress dashboard. Go to Plugins → Add New, search for “Recipe Card Blocks,” then install and activate.
For the premium version, download the plugin, then upload the ZIP file at Plugins → Add New → Upload Plugin. After activating, go to Recipe Cards → Settings and paste your license key in the Activate Your License Key section.
Step #2: Create your recipes with the Recipe Card block
Edit any post or page where you want to publish a recipe. In the block editor, insert the Recipe Card block, then fill in your recipe’s details — title, image, ingredients, instructions, prep time, cook time, servings, and so on:
Use the Notes section for anything that doesn’t fit elsewhere — ingredient substitutions, tips, alternative techniques. When you’re ready, publish the post.
That’s it. The plugin automatically embeds the full schema.org/Recipe markup in the page’s HTML — exactly what Pinterest needs to recognize the page as Rich Pin–eligible. The first time you (or anyone else) saves a Pin from this URL, Pinterest will scrape the page, detect the schema, and start displaying the recipe details on the Pin within roughly 24 hours.
How to verify your Rich Pins are working
Since Pinterest retired its public Rich Pin Validator, the practical way to check that a recipe is being read as a Rich Pin is to test it directly on Pinterest:
- Create a private board on your Pinterest account (so the test Pin isn’t public).
- Save a Pin pointing to one of your live recipe URLs.
- Wait a few hours (allow up to 24 hours for first-time scraping), then check the Pin. If the recipe details — cook time, servings, ingredients — appear on the Pin, Rich Pins are working correctly for that page.
You can also confirm that your underlying schema is well-formed by running the recipe URL through Google’s Rich Results Test. If Google recognizes the page as eligible for Recipe rich results, the same structured data is available for Pinterest to use.
Bonus features
Rich Pins are only one piece of Recipe Card Blocks’ Pinterest support. The plugin also adds a dedicated Pinterest Pin button to every recipe card, so visitors can save your recipe with a single click:
You can also add a Pinterest call-to-action in the footer of every recipe to drive followers to your Pinterest profile:
The PRO version goes further with per-recipe custom Pinterest images (so you can use a tall vertical Pin graphic that’s different from the horizontal image on your blog), custom Pin descriptions, and a setting to prevent visitors from accidentally pinning other images on the page.
For the full breakdown of every Pinterest feature in the plugin, see our Pinterest Integration documentation. And for the broader Pinterest marketing strategy — building a following, customizing pins, using your business account effectively — see our companion post on how to use Pinterest to grow your food blog.
Conclusion
Recipe Rich Pins are one of the highest-leverage things a food blogger can set up on Pinterest — and thanks to changes in how Pinterest detects them, getting started has never been easier. There’s no validator to use, no application to submit, and no Business account requirement. All you need is a WordPress site, the Recipe Card Blocks plugin, and recipes built with the Recipe Card block.
The plugin generates the structured data Pinterest reads, and Pinterest does the rest automatically. Your recipes display with full details on every Pin, your content stays in sync with any updates you make, and the same markup boosts your Google Recipe rich results too.
Ready to start showing up on Pinterest with full recipe details? Get Recipe Card Blocks Pro today!
