Make Food Blog Recipe Reviews More Useful

On food blogs, the comments often hold as much value as the recipe itself. Readers share substitutions, adaptations, and tips for getting the best results. They explain what went wrong so others can avoid the same mistake. When authors reply to or improve their instructions based on feedback, it builds trust and keeps people coming back.

Start with the default WordPress comments

The native WordPress comment system is simple, fast, and flexible to style, making it ideal for most food blogs. If you use WP Recipe Maker (WPRM), ratings integrate cleanly with native comments.

Why not a third-party commenting system?

Plugins like wpDiscuz add enticing features (e.g., image uploads, upvoting), but they also introduce more complexity, styling constraints, and clunky options. In our experience, the trade-offs outweigh the gains for recipe sites that value speed, clean branding, and control.

Other systems, such as Jetpack comments, aren’t compatible with WPRM at all. And some, like Disqus, have fallen out of favor after slowing sites down, inserting ads, and raising serious privacy concerns. 

Inspiration from retail and travel reviews

Big platforms (Amazon, Airbnb, Google Maps, etc.) make reviews scannable with an overall star rating, the total number of reviews, a visual breakdown showing the percentage of 5-star, 4-star, etc. ratings, filters, keyword search, common themes, and short AI-based summaries. Some of these ideas could translate well to food blogs. 

Applying this to WP Recipe Maker

Many recipes now have hundreds, even thousands, of comments listed under the recipe, usually paginated to reduce load time. It’s hard to find something that you might be looking for amongst all the comments, or get an overall sense of what they’re saying, apart from the overall rating. 

By default, WPRM stores the average rating and total ratings. With a small customization, we can also store per-star counts (how many 5-star, 4-star, etc.). That enables a lightweight visual breakdown:

• Overall star rating
• Total ratings
• A compact bar chart showing star distribution. 

This adds helpful at-a-glance context. One note: many food blogs moderate or don’t publish low-quality reviews. Because of that, a per-star breakdown may naturally skew positive, something to keep in mind. 

If there’s demand, we could explore more advanced features as custom projects:

• Clickable per-star filters that gather matching comments across pagination
• Keyword filters (e.g., “substitutions,” “gluten-free”)
• Common themes extraction
• AI-generated summary of comment summaries

For now, adding a clear rating breakdown is a simple, high-impact upgrade that makes recipe feedback far easier to digest. Let us know if you are interested in exploring this!