How to Fix: Nutrition info included

Nutrition info included is an SEO check in the Recipe Sites category, and it is a medium-priority issue. It will not tank your rankings overnight, but on a recipe site it is the difference between a plain blue link and a rich result with a photo, a rating, and a calorie count — and in a crowded SERP, that difference is most of your click-through rate.

What this check is really about

This check verifies that your recipes ship structured nutrition data inside their Recipe schema. Google reads that markup to build recipe rich results and to power the health and diet filters in Google Search and Discover. When the nutrition object is missing, your recipe can still rank, but it competes with one hand tied behind its back — no calorie badge, no eligibility for “under 500 calories” style filtering, a thinner card than the site next to you.

Why it matters for recipe sites

Recipe search is one of the most visually competitive verticals there is. Users scan a wall of cards and click on completeness — the one with the rating, the time, and the nutrition wins the eye. Nutrition data also opens doors that plain recipes never see: dietary filtering, Discover surfacing, and the growing set of health-aware queries. This is low-effort, structured, rule-based work with an outsized payoff, which is exactly the kind of task worth automating across your whole archive.

• It makes recipes eligible for richer, more clickable search results
• It powers Google’s calorie and dietary filters, expanding where you can appear
• It signals completeness and quality to both users and search engines
• Ignoring it leaves you with thinner result cards than competitors who include it

How I would diagnose it

1. Run an SEO audit with the SEO Roadmap tool to find recipes missing nutrition data
2. Drop a few recipe URLs into Google’s Rich Results Test and read the warnings — missing nutrition shows up as a non-critical field
3. Use browser developer tools (F12) to inspect the JSON-LD block and confirm whether the nutrition object is present or empty
4. Check Google Search Console’s Recipe enhancement report for coverage across your catalog

How to fix this in WordPress

Difficulty Level: MEDIUM – This fix requires some technical knowledge or familiarity with WordPress settings and plugins.

Estimated Time: varies

1. Use a proper recipe plugin. WP Recipe Maker, Tasty Recipes, or Create by Mediavine all output valid Recipe schema with a dedicated nutrition section. If you are hand-rolling recipe markup, stop — this is a solved problem.
2. Fill in the nutrition fields for each recipe: at minimum calories, plus servingSize so the numbers mean something. Protein, fat, carbohydrate, and sodium round it out.
3. Automate the backlog. For an archive of hundreds of recipes, a nutrition calculation API or an AI pass over the ingredient list can generate the values in bulk — then spot-check, do not blindly trust.
4. State your basis. Make clear the figures are estimates per serving; it is honest and it heads off complaints.

Verify the fix

1. Clear your WordPress cache if you’re using a caching plugin
2. Re-run the SEO Roadmap audit and the Rich Results Test to confirm nutrition data now validates
3. Check Google Search Console after a few days to ensure Google has recognized the fix in the Recipe enhancement report

A caveat on accuracy

Here is the part I would not skip: nutrition data you publish is a claim, and readers with allergies or medical diets act on it. Auto-generated calorie counts are fine as clearly-labeled estimates, but do not present a computed guess as if a lab measured it. My rule is simple — automate the generation, keep a human in the loop for the review, and never let a plugin publish a “0g sodium” or a wildly off calorie count unchecked because the ingredient parser choked on “1 can” versus “1 cup”. Structured data that is confidently wrong is worse than structured data that is absent.

Recommended Tools & Plugins

These tools can help you fix and prevent this issue:

• Yoast SEO – Comprehensive SEO plugin with built-in checks
• Rank Math – Feature-rich SEO plugin with detailed analysis
• Google Search Console – Free tool to monitor your site’s search presence
• SEO Roadmap – Complete SEO audit and action plan tool

Common Mistakes to Avoid

• Publishing nutrition figures without a serving size, so the numbers are meaningless
• Trusting an ingredient parser’s output without spot-checking obvious errors
• Hand-coding recipe schema instead of using a plugin that keeps up with Google’s spec
• Presenting estimated values as if they were laboratory-measured facts

Need More Help?

If you’re still having trouble fixing this issue, consider:

• Consulting with a WordPress developer or SEO specialist
• Checking the WordPress support forums for similar issues
• Reviewing your theme and plugin documentation
• Running a complete site audit with SEO Roadmap for a prioritized action plan

This guide is part of the SEO Roadmap knowledge base – your complete resource for WordPress SEO optimization.