The best Pinterest plugin for bloggers: Tasty Pins
The WordPress Pinterest plugin every Pinterest user needs to install today!
As a Pinterest lover and Pinterest expert, I am always looking for new ways to be more successful on this awesome platform. Recently, I discovered the Tasty Pins plugin, which is one of the best WordPress Pinterest plugins I’ve downloaded so far. In this post, I’d like to tell you more about this super useful plugin!
I usually try to share as many free plugins as possible with you on She Can Blog, but let’s be honest, some good things come with a price. However, I can honestly say this plugin is 100% worth the investment if you’re active on Pinterest as a business user.
Get your readers to promote your posts for you!
As a blogger, you want to keep your work, as well as the promotion of your work, as simple and efficient as possible. This great Pinterest plugin will help you do just that! In fact, with this plugin you don’t have to promote anything anymore, your readers will do that for you! You just need to install the plugin, and your loyal readers will do the work for you. 🙂 Ok, not exactly true, you still need to do some promoting, but your blog’s visitors will help to promote you.
What this plugin does is ensure that when a visitor wants to pin a blog post from your site to Pinterest, that pin will be pinned to Pinterest the correct way. And with the correct way, I’m talking about the Pinterest SEO optimized way.
In this post, I will explain exactly how that works and why it is important for Pinterest bloggers. Let’s begin!
Disclaimer: This blog post contains affiliate links. I may earn a small commission to fund my coffee-drinking habit if you use these links to make a purchase. You will not be charged extra. So it’s a win for everyone! Please note that I won’t link any products I don’t believe in or don’t resonate with my blog site. Thank you!
What is the WP Tasty Pins plugin?
The WP Tasty plugin is a paid WordPress Pinterest plugin that costs $29. The creators of this plugin initially created the Tasty Recipes plugin, a plugin that is created to make it easier for food bloggers to create and share recipes on their websites. So if you’re a food blogger, this plugin might be well worth your money as well!
There is also another useful plugin designed by these creators, the Tasty Links plugin. This plugin is great for affiliate marketers because it enables you to automatically create affiliate links from the keywords you’ve used in your content.
Decide which images are “pinnable”, and which aren’t
Anyway…back to the plugin that I wanted to tell you about here today; Tasty Pins for Pinterest users! This Pinterest plugin gives you all the control over the sharing of images by your visitors from your website to Pinterest.
That may sound pretty unimportant, because… why can’t we just let everyone pin whatever they want from our websites? I mean, what could go wrong, pinning is not that hard, right?
But the thing is, if you plan to build a serious blogging business with a lot of Pinterest traffic coming your way, that mentality won’t bring you much further down the blogging road.
Tasty Pins features:
- Write Pinterest descriptions for your images
- Use the Alt-tags for Google SEO purposes only
- Hide Pinterest-specific images
- Prevent the pinning of images that aren’t optimized for Pinterest
- Force pinning of images that are optimized for Pinterest
- Enable the Pinterest-hover button
- Add a repin-ID
- Lightweight plugin
Ok, I get it, this all probably sounds like a foreign language to you now, so please allow me to explain these features to you. :))
Also read: 14 WordPress settings you need to configure today
Write Pinterest descriptions for your images
By default, WordPress allows you to include one description to your images in the Alt tags. This description is intended for Google SEO and not for Pinterest. The description Pinterest needs is a different description than the one you want to write for Google SEO.
The alt-tag describes what you can see on the image. You basically tell the search engines: “hey, on this image there is a woman working on a laptop”. This way the search engines are able to index your image better and this helps to increase SEO. The alt-tags are also meant to provide additional information for those who are visually impaired. If they aren’t able to see the image well, screen readers will read them out loud so they can still understand what the image depicts and this will improve the user experience of your website.
The description of a Pinterest pin, on the other hand, is meant to tell the user and Pinterest what can be found on the page of the URL being linked to. And the idea here is to use Pinterest keywords to write this description.
When one of your blog’s visitors then pins your pin to a board, it will be pinned with the correct Pinterest-optimized SEO description. And this then allows Pinterest to pick up on this newly created pin and distribute it better on the platform!
If you can only insert the default Alt-tag, this pin will most likely never be picked up by Pinterest. And then it probably never reaches other pinners on the Pinterest platform except for the one person who pinned it to one of their boards.
Use the Alt-tag for Google SEO purposes only
So, as you’ve learned now, the description you give to the Alt-tags has a different purpose than the description you give to your Pinterest images. This is why it is so important for Pinterest users/bloggers to be able to separate the two.
Thanks to the Tasty Pins plugin, you can! Tasty Pins creates extra fields for your Pinterest pin descriptions, so you can use the alt-tags and your Pinterest tags to their fullest potential. This way you can optimize your images for Google SEO and for Pinterest SEO!
Awesome, right?
Use this WordPress Pinterest plugin to hide Pinterest-specific images
Another great thing the plugin has to offer – which was the main reason I bought it in the first place – is the option to hide Pinterest-specific images in your blog posts.
Wait… what?! Why would I spend all this effort into creating beautiful Pinterest images to hide them, you’re probably asking yourself right now.
I get it! It doesn’t sound logical at all, but as a Pinterest user, it is. Let me explain it to you:
The process of loading images on your blog has a significant effect on the overall load time of the page. And if your pages take a long time to load, Google does not regard this page as an interesting page to show up high in the search results. Therefore, it’s wise to avoid adding images to your blog post that are irrelevant to your readers.
Most bloggers use different images for their blog posts than they do for Pinterest. This is because Pinterest has specific requirements for the size of Pinterest pins (1000x1500px). This means, you want your Pinterest images to be available for your visitors who want to pin them, but not for the visitors who just want to read your blog post.
Another reason why Pinterest images are different than regular blog post images is the fact that you want to create multiple pins for each blog post. Suppose you’ve written a post with the title: “How do I gain more Pinterest traffic to my blog?”, then you need to create several pins with different titles, for example:
- How do I drive more Pinterest traffic to my blog?
- How I get over 800k monthly Pinterest viewers on Pinterest and how you can too!
- The best Pinterest tips for more web traffic
Three different titles that all direct to the same blog post. But each title attracts different Pinterest users. That’s why I suggest you offer several Pinterest pins to the readers of your blog as well.
With the Tasty Pins plugin, you will be able to upload multiple pins, invisible, without cluttering your website and negatively impacting load times! Only when a visitor presses the Pinterest sharing button do these Pinterest images show up!
Prevent the pinning of images that aren’t optimized for Pinterest
Another thing you want to avoid is the pinning of images that aren’t created or optimized for Pinterest. For example, your profile picture, images with other dimensions, or images that you haven’t optimized for Pinterest SEO.
This has happened to me quite often and it is such a waste. One of your visitors puts in the effort to share your post on Pinterest, which is awesome! But that pin will never be re-pinned by other users, like ever. Because it doesn’t have the right keywords attached to it, and it doesn’t have the right image to attract Pinterest users to click on your link.
You want your readers to only pin the images from your website that you created specifically for that purpose. Tasty Pins helps with that! 🙂 You can select the images you want to be force pinned!
Enable Pinterest hover-button
You’ve probably seen it before, the Pin it-button that appears when you hover over an image on a website, right? (Mine is in Dutch because of my settings).
This allows people to directly pin an image from your website to one of their Pinterest boards. They can also use your social share buttons of course, but this is an extra feature you could enable with Tasty Pins.
On the other hand, if you’ve made your pinnable images all invisible, this button will obviously be of pretty little use.
Add a repin ID
Another very clever feature this plugin has to offer is the option to add a repin ID.
When a visitor pins a post directly from your website, Pinterest considers this a completely new pin and not a re-pin. And that’s a pity because pins that are frequently re-pinned are shown more often by the platform to other Pinterest users. By adding the ID of the original pin to the image in Tasty Pins, this new pin will count as a re-pin as well!
And there is yet another reason why adding a re-pin ID is important; Pinterest doesn’t like it when the same pin is pinned as a new pin too many times on the platform.
It happened to me a while ago with another account; my account ended up in the spam filter and got marked as spam! .
By attaching a Pinterest ID to your images, you send a signal to Pinterest that it is just a re-pin and not a spammy new pin that has already been posted multiple times as a fresh pin.
Where to find the Pin ID?
You can find the Pin ID of a Pinterest pin in the URL of the original pin. For example, if this is the original link to your pin: https://pinterest.com/pin/699043173412002979/
Then your Pin ID is the part with all the numbers: 699043173412002979
After uploading the image, click on the image in the Tasty Pins section and there you will find the option to enter the repin ID in your media library!
Lightweight plugin
Another advantage of this plugin is that it is a lightweight plugin and it will not slow down your website (too much). Of course, a plugin is a plugin, and it will always have a small impact on your website, especially when you install too many of them. But this is a reliable plugin, that doesn’t put a heavyweight on your site.
How does Tasty Pins work?
Unlike most plugins, you can’t download this plugin directly from your WordPress dashboard, but you have to purchase it first from the WP Tasty website first. After purchase you will receive a zip file that you need to upload to WordPress:
- Go to your WordPress dashboard
- Click on Plugins in the menu and click on Add new
- Click on Upload plugin
- Upload your zip-file
- Activate the plugin
- That’s it!
You’re now the proud owner of the Tasty Pins plugin!
From now on, you can find all the options for this plugin at the bottom of your Gutenberg editor. This is where you can upload all your pinnable images, and add Pin Titles, Re-pin ID’s, and Pin Descriptions.
Don’t forget to use Pinterest keywords for your pin titles and pin descriptions.
Enable the force pinning option to ensure your visitors can only pin the images you have made pinnable and have optimized for Pinterest SEO.
Do you want to learn how to create stunning pinnable images? Read my tutorial on how to create Pinterest pins in Canva here!
Want to learn more about Pinterest SEO? Click here to read my post about driving Pinterest traffic to your blog!
Final Thoughts
As far as I’m concerned, this plugin is well worth the €29! This plugin is meant for bloggers who are active on Pinterest and (want to) make a living out of it. If your blog isn’t visited often, or if you’re not a consistent pinner on Pinterest, this plugin isn’t going to do much for you.
If you are serious about blogging and are looking for a way to promote your blog posts even better to boost your Pinterest game, this plugin will earn itself back easily, and it will save you time as well!
Don’t like the plugin after purchasing it? You can get your money back within 15 days! And if you don’t think this plugin is worth the money, you just get your money back within 15 days! No questions asked!
Angie
Ps. Did you like this post? Then don’t forget to share it on social media! Thank you so much. 🙂
I have been looking into plugins for pinterest. Thank you for going into so much detail about this plugin. Its really helpful to be able to see all of the features and benefits!
Happy to hear this was helpful to you!
I really loved this post. Going to use one of these plugins myself!
Thank you!
Thank you for your review of Tasty Pins.
You’re welcome!
Great minds think alike! Recently wrote a post on Tasty Pins as well, its such a handy tool. Don’t know how I’d cope without it.
Yess!! Me neither, I don’t pay for many plugins, and this is one of the few that’s really well-worth the investment!
This is so helpful! I have been debating using tasty pins for a while. I think I will give it a try now. Thanks!
Thank you for letting me know! And yes, Tasty Pins is really worth the investment. X
Wow this is such an informative post! Thank you for sharing, I find Pinterest so hard at the moment x
Thank you so much! I know, Pinterest is hard to keep up with, there are so many algorithm changes. 🙁 Still I believe it’s worth our time and effort to invest in it.