Health Check

The Health Check feature can be found on the WP Recipe Maker > Dashboard page and does a check-up of anything recipe related on your site. It's an extendable feature that allows us to add more checks to it as needed. If that happens it will show that you have an "outdated" check and will recommend you to run one again.

Ideally, you run the health check every month or so, allowing you to quickly act if it finds any problems at all.

Health Check Sections

Depending on the problems it finds, the following sections can show up:

SEO

This section will always show up and give you an overview of the SEO status of your recipes. In a perfect world, all of them would be "Good". If that's the case, they have all the metadata fields filled in that Google wants to see, both recommended and required ones.

If you have recipes showing up under "Only missing recipe ratings", you have filled in everything you could, but your visitors haven't rated the recipe yet. Our User Ratings and Comment Ratings feature both count towards these ratings.

If your recipes miss some "recommended fields", it's not an immediate problem. These are just recommendations by Google on how to make the metadata complete. That will not generate errors.

Having recipes listed under "Missing required fields" is a problem and should be looked at immediately. These are the bare minimum to fill in.

By hovering over the recipe metadata checker on the WP Recipe Maker > Manage page you can learn more about the exact fields that are missing.

Multiple Parents

These recipes have been added to more than 1 post or page. A recipe should generally only exist in 1 parent post. References should be made using the Recipe Roundup feature instead. This is also recommended for SEO.

Missing Thumbnails

When you upload an image to WordPress it automatically generates multiple thumbnail sizes for that image. So if your original image is 1200 by 1200 pixels, WordPress will make sure different, smaller thumbnails exist as well so that these can be used throughout your site if the original (large and heavy) image isn't needed.

Google expects to see 3 different ratios for the recipe image in the recipe metadata. WP Recipe Maker automatically generates those ratios for the recipe images, but some of them might be missing. This can happen if you converted those recipes from another plugin, for example.

The first thing to try is using the Regenerate Thumbnails plugin. After installing you can go to the Tools > Regenerate Thumbnails page and click the blue button to regenerate thumbnails for all your images. This makes sure that the required thumbnail sizes (asked for by your theme and plugins) exist for every image.

It could also be that the images you uploaded are too small. Make sure they are at least 500 by 500 pixels and have a look at these recommendations.

Duplicate Names

This section shows up if multiple recipes with the exact same name were found.

We've seen it happen when importing from other plugins that you end up with duplicates. Usually the one that isn't actually used in a parent post can safely be deleted.

Compatibility

WP Recipe Maker should work fine with most plugins and themes, but if we do learn about a compatibility issue that not can be fix from our end, we'll mention it in this section. The section will only show up if you have a plugin/theme causing that problem enabled.

Searching other post types

By default the Health Check only searches through posts and pages, looking for recipes. If you have an advanced setup with recipes being added to a different post type, you could use the wprm_health_check_post_types filter hook to add your custom post type.