A recipe website that gets cooks to the ingredients fast
The common complaint about recipe sites is scrolling past a long story to find out how much flour. A good recipe page does the opposite: name, a line about the dish, timings and servings, ingredients, method, then any story underneath. Keep every recipe in the same structure and give each its own page so it can be found and shared.
The anatomy of a recipe page
- Name and one line: "Grandma Rose's lemon drizzle: a loaf cake, sharp and sticky."
- At a glance: serves, prep time, cook time, total time, difficulty, and any dietary notes such as vegetarian or contains nuts.
- Ingredients, in the order they're used, with quantities and units consistent across the site.
- Method, numbered, one action per step, with what to look for ("until it springs back when pressed") as well as timings.
- Notes: substitutions, storage, freezing, scaling.
- The story, if there is one, at the end.
Write quantities the way your readers measure. A site for UK and European cooks should lead with grams and millilitres; if many readers use cups, give both. Oven temperatures need both Celsius and Fahrenheit, plus fan or conventional.
Recipes as a collection with typed fields
A recipe website stays consistent when every recipe is entered the same way. In Anticode, keep recipes in a CMS collection with typed fields, edited in the dashboard. Each recipe is served as its own page at /<collection>/<slug> and the collection page lists them all, so a link to one recipe goes straight to it.
| Field | Example |
|---|---|
| Title | Lemon drizzle loaf |
| Summary | A loaf cake, sharp and sticky |
| Serves | 8 |
| Prep time / cook time | 15 minutes / 45 minutes |
| Course | Baking |
| Ingredients | One per line, with quantities |
| Method | Numbered steps |
| Notes | Keeps for three days in a tin; freezes well |
| Story | Where the recipe came from |
Settle the fields before you enter fifty recipes. Changing a structure later means revisiting every entry, and a missing "serves" on a third of the recipes is the kind of inconsistency readers notice.
Family recipe collections
A family recipe website is one of the nicest things to build and one of the easiest to let slide. Collect recipes in one go: ask relatives to write them down, cook each one once to check the quantities (handwritten cards often say "a cup of flour" and mean a specific teacup), and photograph the result. Add a line on who made it and when. Uploading scans of the original cards to the build alongside the typed recipe keeps the handwriting, which often matters more to the family than the recipe.
Being found
Every published site serves its own sitemap.xml, robots.txt and llms.txt, so search engines and AI assistants can find and read your pages. Recipe searches are competitive, and your best chance is specificity: "lemon drizzle with olive oil" or "Lancashire hotpot the way my nan made it" are searches a big site doesn't answer as well as you can. Write a real summary for each recipe and use the dish's common name in its title.
On rights: a list of ingredients is generally treated as a fact, but the wording of a method, the introduction and the photos are someone's work. If you adapt a recipe from a book or another site, rewrite the method in your own words, credit the source, and never copy their photos.
Building it with Anticode
As a recipe website builder, Anticode starts from a description: "a personal recipe collection site for my family's recipes, with a recipe collection, a page per recipe, and sections for baking, mains and preserves". The Architect shows a plan first. Editorial (Geist) suits a food writer; Organic (Figtree) or Playful (Fredoka) suit a family collection. Upload your food photos to the build so the model can see and place them.
Limits
- No comments or ratings. Readers can send feedback through the contact form.
- No serving-size scaler or unit converter on the page, since pages run no scripts. A recipe box app built separately can do that in the browser.
- No print-friendly recipe card button. Browsers' own print still works.
- No cooking videos on the page. Embeds and video files don't play on these pages; link to the video on YouTube or Vimeo.
- No paywall or member recipes. Everything published is public.
Questions people ask
How many recipes do I need before publishing?
Ten well-tested recipes is a fine start. Add more as you cook them; each is a new entry in the collection.
Can I sell a recipe ebook from the site?
Yes, with a buy button pointing at a payment link from Gumroad, Lemon Squeezy or another provider you use.
Can readers subscribe for new recipes?
Add a newsletter form and send sign-ups to Mailchimp or Kit. There are no RSS feeds, so email is the way to tell readers about new recipes.