Pinterest for Food Bloggers: How One Food Blog Grew from 4K to 41K Clicks per Month

As a Pinterest for bloggers expert, I’m a big fan of the platform for all lifestyle niches, but food bloggers are really one of those niches that MUST be on the platform. It’s one of the few generalizations I’m happy to make. That’s because, time and time again, I’ve seen Pinterest grow website traffic to food blogs exponentially. Today, we’ll dive into Pinterest for food bloggers and what we’ve seen work.

Why Pinterest Is Essential for Food Bloggers

Food bloggers are one of the few creator niches that still utilize there website for a majority of their content. That’s because all of us are extremely comfortable going to Pinterest or Google to find a recipe and then going to a bloggers’ site to get said recipe. It’s the path I take at least 3 times a week to make dinner for my family, and I’m not the only one.

Recipes are much easier to digest within a website rather than on social, and while sometimes we just happen to scroll past one that works… more often we’re on search platforms trying to find one that fits our specific needs. We utilize keywords that match like “dairy free,” “super easy, “30 minute,” “crockpot dinner,” etc. You know what also uses those… search engines!

(And yes, Pinterest is a search engine.)

Monetizing Pinterest for Food Bloggers

The other reason Pinterest is so great for food bloggers is the monetization and community building aspects of sending people to your food blog. Food bloggers are easy to monetize with display ads because often new people come to your website and stay there to follow a recipe. So the traffic alone is useful when it comes to Pinterest, but there are even more ways to monetize your food blog.

I love a simple, but impactful funnel when it comes to monetizing blog traffic from Pinterest. I share more about that in this blog post about monetization but let me paint a food blog specific picture for you:

1. A user searches “crockpot dinner recipe for 4” in the Pinterest search bar
2. They see your well-designed pin that ranked high due to your Pinterest SEO skills
3. They click on the pin to get the full recipe
4. While on your site they are making you display ad revenue
5. Then they get a pop for an e-mail opt-in for “12 crockpot dinners that take 30 minutes or less”
6. They sign up to receive that e-mail
7. Now they’re on your list and can get future emails
8. They come back for a new blog post about a crockpot buffalo chicken dip
9. And the cycle repeats… they’re in your community rather than being a quick viewer and leaver

Long-term Benefits of Pinterest Food Blog Traffic

I also love the ability food bloggers have for turning a highly trafficked blog into a physical cookbook. I know that’s a dream of so many food creators, and I also know that having a community to sell that cookbook to is so important. You can’t launch a cookbook to crickets, and having sustainable traffic sources ensures that’s not the case.

There are so many benefits to saying “the corner of the internet that I own and that no social platform changes can take away from me is active and full of fans” cannot be overstated.

How We Grew a Food Blogger’s Pinterest Traffic by 925%

Let me be clear on growth. This took 1 year. So January 2024= 4.1K outbound clicks to her blog and January 2025= 41K outbound clicks to her blog. Case studies are tricky because they don’t share all details, just to protect client privacy, but I do want to be as transparent as possible.

Pinterest is a long game and comparing year-over-year is the most apple-to-apples we can get. That way seasonal peaks and other content trends don’t change the data set. And it also wasn’t a straight uphill growth. There were (and still are) up’s and downs in the numbers, and that’s normal especially as Pinterest changes so much.

The Food Blog Before Outsourcing Pinterest

Listen, this was already a thriving and highly-trafficked food blog before we got in there. It was a seasoned blogger with an incredible backlog of recipes that were doing great. What made the blogger want to outsource Pinterest to us was not a failing blog. It was for two reasons:

1. She had plateaued on Pinterest for the last 6 months.
2. Google was inconsistent and she didn’t want all her eggs in the Google SEO basket.

The other traffic driver for her was Instagram, but again, not something that was so consistent or stable and it very much depended on her activity on the platform to get results, so she was hoping Pinterest would add a stability to her traffic.

The Food Blog After Outsourcing Pinterest

Obviously, the traffic to the blog from Pinterest increased as did the other major metrics on Pinterest. Saves, impressions and even followers grew, but there were a lot of other great wins once Pinterest because a major traffic source:

1. Pinterest outperformed Instagram as a traffic source therefore allowing the creator to step back from Instagram for periods without tanking her traffic.
2. Pinterest gave her additional data for recipe ideation (more on this below).
3. She didn’t have to worry about posting or even about new blog posts, Pinterest was really growing traffic to her older content no matter what her blog post schedule was.
4. She did see the benefit of a round up for Pinterest and leaned in (which helped us help her)!

Pinterest as a Recipe Idea Generator

I constantly talk about this for my bloggers, because I think Pinterest is extremely underutilized as a content ideation tool. Food bloggers can literally research exactly what people are and will be searching and when they’ll be searching it using the Pinterest Trends Tool.

This allows them to come up with recipes about what people want, when people want. It’s truly an incredible tool, and this particular client really leaned into that. She allowed us to share insights into how Pinterest was categorizing her content and find trends on what was performing well, and she leaned into that by making more content along those lines or sharing what content she already had with us so we could further promote it.

She also leaned into roundups which consistently performed well for her and was a low-lift way to get big wins on Pinterest.

Is Pinterest Worth It for Food Bloggers in 2026?

Yes, absolutely. I always recommend you have a plan (preferably a funnel) of what you’ll do with that traffic that comes from Pinterest, but I do think it’s worth it for all food bloggers. If you have a website where your recipes live, you want people to see those recipes. Pinterest brings people who are actively searching for those recipes to them.

Is Pinterest in 2026 much different than 2018 Pinterest when I started… yes, unfortunately. Pinterest has some issues in terms of crappy AI content and way too many ads for my liking, BUT that doesn’t mean it isn’t a traffic driver and a marketing tool to have in your toolbox.

Whether you want help with defining the right Pinterest strategy for your food blog or just want our team of Pinterest experts to do it for you, please reach out today. The sooner you get started, the sooner you diversify your traffic sources and can stop stressing when Google decides to do a painful update.