How to Fix: Prep/cook times included

Prep/cook times included is an important SEO check in the Recipe Sites category. This is a high-priority SEO issue that should be addressed soon. It has a significant impact on your SEO performance.

What this check actually means

Every recipe on your site should declare, in machine-readable form, how long it takes to prepare and to cook. That means the prepTime, cookTime, and totalTime properties inside your Recipe structured data — not just a sentence in the intro that says “ready in about half an hour.” This check fails when the times are missing from the schema, or present on the page for humans but absent from the markup Google reads.

The distinction matters more than it sounds. A human reads “20 minutes prep” and understands. Google needs it as PT20M in ISO 8601 duration format, sitting in the Recipe object, or the recipe rich result simply will not show a time.

Why it matters

Recipe search is one of the most visually competitive results pages on the web, and time is a headline filter. When someone searches “quick weeknight pasta,” Google can surface the recipe rich result with a total time badge right in the listing — and the person scanning results is choosing partly on that number. A recipe with no time shown loses the click to the one beside it that says “30 min.” You are not just missing a nice-to-have; you are handing the click to a competitor who filled in one field.

Time data also feeds the recipe filters and the cook-time facets in Google’s recipe experiences. If your times are missing, you are excluded from those filtered views entirely, no matter how good the dish is.

How to check it

• Run a few recipe URLs through Google’s Rich Results Test. It will tell you whether a valid Recipe is detected and whether the time fields are present or flagged as missing.
• Check Google Search Console under the Recipe enhancement report for “missing field” warnings — prep and cook time are common ones.
• View the page source and search for prepTime and cookTime. If they are absent, the schema is incomplete regardless of what the visible text says.

How to Fix This in WordPress

Difficulty Level: EASY – This fix is straightforward and can typically be completed by anyone with basic WordPress knowledge.

Estimated Time: varies

Rated EASY, and it genuinely is — this is one of the highest-return, lowest-effort fixes on the whole list.

Step 1: Use a real recipe plugin

If you are typing recipes into the regular editor as plain paragraphs, that is the root cause. A dedicated recipe plugin — WP Recipe Maker, Tasty Recipes, or the recipe block in your SEO plugin — gives you a proper recipe card with dedicated fields for prep time and cook time, and it outputs valid Recipe schema automatically. Move your recipes into that card and the time fields come along for free.

Step 2: Fill in prep and cook time on every recipe

Go through your recipes and populate both fields. The plugin handles the ISO 8601 conversion for you, so you just enter “20 minutes.” Total time is usually calculated automatically, but confirm it. Do not leave a field blank because a step is negligible — enter it honestly rather than omit it.

Step 3: Prioritize your best performers first

If you have hundreds of recipes, do not start alphabetically. Pull your top traffic recipes from Search Console and fix those first — they are the ones already close to a rich result, so the time badge there earns clicks immediately.

Step 4: Verify

1. Clear your WordPress cache if you’re using a caching plugin
2. Re-run the Rich Results Test on the recipes you fixed to confirm the time fields now validate
3. Re-run the SEO Roadmap audit, and watch the Recipe enhancement report in Search Console clear over the following days

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

What I would avoid

• Putting times only in the prose intro and assuming Google reads them — it needs the schema fields.
• Running two recipe plugins or hand-coded schema plus a plugin at once, which produces duplicate or conflicting Recipe objects.
• Inflating or lowballing times to look faster — inaccurate times erode the trust that keeps people on your recipes.
• Fixing one recipe and assuming the rest inherited it; each recipe card carries its own fields.

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