How to Skip to the Recipe (Without the Life Story or the Ads)

You searched for banana bread, you have flour on your hands, and the recipe is somewhere below a story about a trip to Vermont, forty photos and an ad that moves every time you scroll.

There are four free ways to get straight to the recipe, and every one of them works without installing anything. This guide shows each one on iPhone, Android and a computer, explains why recipe pages are built this way (the bloggers have a point), and how to keep just the recipe so you never scroll for it again.

How far down is the recipe, really?#

We opened six popular food blogs on a phone-sized screen and measured how far you scroll before the recipe card starts. The card is the boxed part with the ingredient list, the steps and the Print button.

So the recipe is there, and it is complete. It is just a long way down. Here is how to skip the trip.

Way 1: Tap the Jump to Recipe button#

Most food blogs run on recipe card tools that add a small row of buttons just under the post title, usually Jump to Recipe, often Print Recipe, and sometimes Jump to Video. The popular WordPress recipe plugin WP Recipe Maker, for example, ships exactly those three buttons as its default.

1. 1

   Look just under the title

   The button sits above the first photo or right after the opening paragraph. On some blogs it is a plain text link rather than a colored button.
2. 2

   Tap it once

   The page glides down to the recipe card. In our test it landed on the card on all five blogs that had one, within about two seconds.
3. 3

   Landed short? Tap again

   If you tap before the page has finished loading, photos and ads above the recipe can load in and push it down. Wait a few seconds and tap the button again.

Way 2: Turn on reader mode in your browser#

Every major browser has a reading view that strips a page down to its text and photos: no ads, no pop-ups, no video player chasing you down the screen. Each one calls it something slightly different, which is half the reason people never find it. Pick your device and browser:

Reader mode does not delete the story. It removes everything around it, so the page gets far shorter and calmer, and the recipe card is still at the end of the article. The worry people have is that it drops the recipe itself. It does not, at least not on the blogs we tried: Firefox's Reader View runs on an open-source engine called Readability, and when we ran it on all six blogs, every ingredient and step line we checked came through on five of them, and all but one line on the sixth.

Way 3: Open the print view (you don't have to print)#

The Print or Print Recipe button on the recipe card opens a separate page that holds only the recipe card: title, times, ingredients, steps and notes. It is meant for the printer, but it doubles as the cleanest way to read the recipe on screen.

• On a phone: just read it. Bookmark the print page if you will make the recipe again.
• On a computer: in the print window, choose Save as PDF as the printer to keep a copy without paper.
• Bonus on some blogs: the print page lets you change the number of servings or switch to metric before you print.

Why are recipe pages so long?#

It is tempting to assume bloggers pad their posts out of vanity. The real reason is money, and it is worth knowing before you get annoyed. A food blog is usually a small business, and the recipes are free to you because the blogger is paid by the ads around them.

• Ads pay per view, and pay very little. A longer post has room for more ad spots, which is why they appear every few paragraphs.
• Search engines reward thorough pages. Tips, swaps, storage advice and answers to common questions help a post show up in Google, which is how most readers find it.
• Plenty of that text is genuinely useful. Why the butter must be soft, what to do if you have no buttermilk, how to tell when it is done. Experienced cooks skip it; first-timers are glad it is there.
• A recipe costs real work to make. Bloggers test a recipe several times, photograph it and write it up before it is posted.

That is the trade: free recipes in exchange for page views. Many bloggers point readers who would rather skip at the Jump to Recipe button, which is exactly what it is for. If a blog's recipes keep working for you, leave a star rating, share the post or buy the cookbook. Those are what keep the free recipes coming.

Way 4: Save just the recipe, so you never scroll for it again#

Every trick above has to be repeated each time you open the post. The permanent fix is to keep a copy of the recipe itself, minus the page around it. A recipe app such as CookEase does that from the page's link: you keep the ingredients with amounts, the steps, the photo, the times and the servings, and CookEase works out the nutrition per serving. A View Original button on every saved recipe goes back to the blog, so the creator still gets the credit and the visit.

cookeaseapp.com/recipe

Which way should you use?#

If you are cooking this once, the Jump to Recipe button or reader mode is all you need. If it is going into your regular rotation, keep a copy.

Once the recipe is on your screen, the next annoyance is the screen going dark mid-step. Our guide to keeping your phone screen on while cooking fixes that. And if your recipes come from Reels rather than blogs, see how to save recipes from Instagram.

Looking for something to cook first?

Discover is full of recipes other cooks have shared, already trimmed to the ingredients and steps.