Pinterest is one of the highest-converting social platforms for food bloggers — visual, search-driven, and unlike most social networks, every pin links directly back to your site. Recipe Card Blocks ships with native Pinterest support so visitors can save your recipes with a single click, with full control over which image and description get pinned.
This guide covers everything the plugin offers for Pinterest: Rich Pins, the Pin button, custom Pinterest images and descriptions, the Footer CTA, and how to prevent visitors from pinning images you don’t want shared.
For the bigger-picture marketing side — why Pinterest matters for food blogs, business accounts, growing your following — see our blog post on how to use Pinterest to grow your food blog.
A Rich Pin automatically syncs information from your website onto any Pin that links to it. For recipes, that can include the title, cook time, servings, ratings, and ingredients shown right on the Pin. Rich Pins are separate from the Pin button: the Pin button is how visitors save your recipe; a Rich Pin is how Pinterest enriches that saved Pin with your recipe’s details.
Recipe Card Blocks makes your recipes Rich Pin–ready automatically. Pinterest builds Rich Pins from the structured data in your page, and the plugin already outputs complete schema.org/Recipe markup for every recipe card — title, ingredients, instructions, prep/cook times, nutrition, and ratings. There’s no Rich Pins setting in the plugin and nothing to configure: if your recipe uses the Recipe Card block, the data Pinterest needs is already there.
<meta name="pinterest-rich-pin" content="false" /> to that page’s <head>.In short: the plugin already provides the recipe data Pinterest needs, and Pinterest picks it up on its own — no setup, no validator, no application.
Recipe Card Blocks adds a Pinterest “Pin it” button to each recipe card, letting visitors save your recipe directly to a Pinterest board without leaving your site. It’s enabled by default.
This controls the Pin button for new recipes. Recipes you’ve already published keep their existing per-recipe setting unless you enable the Apply globally toggle next to the option, which forces the button state across all existing recipe cards (useful if you previously changed it on individual posts). The toggle is labeled “Override all existing recipes.”
The Pin button is an anchor tag with Pinterest’s data-pin-do="buttonPin" and data-pin-custom="true" attributes, linking to a pinterest.com/pin/create/button/ URL pre-filled with the page URL, your chosen pin image, and your chosen description. Your recipe images additionally carry data-pin-media and data-pin-description attributes, and the plugin loads Pinterest’s official pinit.js script to enhance the button. When a visitor clicks it, a Pinterest “Create Pin” window opens with your image, your description, and a link back to the recipe page.
Under the same Pinterest section, the Pin Image Source setting controls which image gets pinned when a visitor clicks the button. Two options:
Uses the main image you set inside the Recipe Card block. This is the same image that appears in the Recipe schema markup and is shown at the top of the recipe card. For most food bloggers, this is the right default — it keeps a single source of truth and works without per-post configuration.
If a recipe has no image set inside the Recipe Card block, the plugin falls back to the post’s Featured Image for the pin.
If you want to provide a separate Pinterest-optimized image for each recipe — for example, a tall vertical graphic with text overlay designed specifically for Pinterest — switch this setting to Custom Image per Recipe.
Once enabled, each recipe gets a dedicated Pinterest Custom Image field in the Recipe Card block sidebar in the editor. Upload your Pinterest-optimized image there, and the plugin will use it as the pin media instead of the main recipe image.
This is the cleanest way to resolve the common tension between Google’s preference for horizontal/square recipe images and Pinterest’s preference for vertical 2:3 (1000×1500) graphics. Your readers and Google see the clean recipe image inside the card; Pinterest gets the tall, branded version.
The Pin Description Source setting controls the default text that pre-fills the Pinterest description field when someone pins your recipe. Three options:
Uses your recipe’s title as the pin description. Simple and works without configuration.
Uses the recipe summary (the short description shown at the top of the recipe card). This gives Pinterest users a richer description than just the title and can help with engagement, but only works well if you write good summaries.
Lets you write a dedicated Pinterest description for each recipe — typically more keyword-rich and Pinterest-optimized than your on-page summary. When this option is selected, a Pinterest Custom Description field appears in the Recipe Card block sidebar in the editor.
Pinterest’s own creative guidelines recommend descriptions up to around 500 characters, written naturally with relevant keywords for discovery. The custom text option gives you that flexibility per recipe.
Tasty Pins compatibility: If you use the Tasty Pins plugin, Recipe Card Blocks automatically respects its hidden Pinterest description. When a Pinterest text is set on your recipe image via Tasty Pins, it takes precedence over the Pin Description Source setting above — you don’t need to configure anything. (Technically, the plugin reads the tp_pinterest_text value Tasty Pins stores on the recipe image.)
When the Pin button is set up correctly, Pinterest knows exactly which image you want pinned for each recipe. But visitors using Pinterest browser extensions (or hovering over any image with a third-party Pin button) can still pin any image on the page — including your author photo, ad creatives, decorative graphics, or sponsor logos.
To prevent this, enable Disable Pinning Other Images in the Pinterest section.
When this option is on, the plugin adds the data-pin-nopin="true" attribute to images on the page except your recipe card image (so the image you actually want pinned isn’t blocked). It also explicitly covers:
This is Pinterest’s official method for excluding images from being pinned. With it enabled, visitors are steered toward pinning your recipe image (or your dedicated Pinterest image via the Pin button) — exactly what you want.
In addition to the Pin button, Recipe Card Blocks can display a footer call-to-action that encourages readers to follow your Pinterest profile.
To set this up:
%profile% placeholder is automatically replaced with a link to your Pinterest profile).The Pinterest CTA only appears when the username field has a value. Leave it empty to hide the section entirely.
For the full guide to enabling and customizing all CTAs (Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, and rating prompts), see Adding Social Media Call-to-Actions.
The Pin button’s default colors (Pinterest red background #C62122, white text) can be changed globally for all new recipes:
These are single, site-wide defaults (they’re grouped under the Vibrant Skin section but apply regardless of which skin you use). By default they apply only to new recipes — existing recipes keep whatever colors they had before. To force the new colors across every recipe on your site, enable the Apply globally (“Override all existing recipes”) toggle next to each color setting.
Recommendation: Keep the Pin button red (Pinterest’s brand color,
#C62122). The familiar red gives visitors instant visual recognition and tends to outperform custom colors for clickthrough.
The Pin button requires Pinterest’s pinit.js script. If you’re not using the Pin button anywhere on your site, you can disable this script so it doesn’t load.
As the setting’s own help text notes, enable this only if you use the Pin It button in Recipe Card blocks; otherwise disabling it prevents the Pinterest script from loading. If the Pin button is enabled but this is off, the button will appear but won’t function.
A few tips that consistently improve Pinterest performance for food blogs:
Use 2:3 vertical aspect ratio. Pinterest’s own creative guidelines recommend 1000×1500 pixels (or similar 2:3 ratio). Vertical images take up more screen real estate in the feed and get more saves.
Write descriptive alt text on your recipe images. Even when you’re not using a custom Pin description, well-written alt text helps Pinterest’s algorithm understand what your image depicts and helps your pins surface for relevant searches.
Provide a custom Pinterest image when it matters. Your hero recipe image is optimized for Google rich results and on-page display (typically horizontal or square). A separate vertical Pinterest image — with the dish name as a clean text overlay and your brand at the bottom — performs much better on Pinterest. Use the Custom Image per Recipe option in the plugin to set this up.
Don’t write descriptions like ad copy. Pinterest users respond to natural, helpful descriptions — “An easy 30-minute weeknight pasta with garlic, lemon, and brown butter” — much better than promotional copy.
Use the Pinterest CTA. Recipes that include a “follow me on Pinterest” call-to-action consistently gain more profile follows than recipes without one.
For details on image dimensions, aspect ratios, and how Recipe Card Blocks handles image markup, see our Recipe Images: Sizes, SEO & Best Practices guide.
Recipe Card Blocks’ Pin button covers the recipe card itself — one Pin button per recipe, pinning your designated recipe image. This is the right behavior for most food blogs.
If you want to add Pin buttons that appear when visitors hover over any image on your blog (not just the recipe card image — but step photos, process shots, finished-dish photos in the post body, and so on), you can use the WPZOOM Social Share Plugin. The PRO version includes a Pinterest Image Hover Pins feature that:
nopin attribute and CSS classes for exclusionsThe two plugins complement each other: Recipe Card Blocks gives you the Pin button on the recipe card with your recipe’s intended Pinterest media, while Social Share PRO extends Pinterest sharing to every image in your content.
For the full setup, see the Pinterest Image Hover Pins documentation.
Current version: 7.1.7
