Two features in ChefMate are aimed specifically at return visits rather than first-time search traffic: letting readers save recipes into their own collections, and letting readers submit their own recipes to the site.
Recipe collections
Logged-in readers (or, depending on configuration, a lightweight cookie-based session for those who don’t want to create an account) can save recipes into named collections — “weeknight dinners,” “meal prep,” whatever grouping makes sense for the site. The actual value here is bringing people back: a reader with three saved collections has a reason to return to the site directly instead of finding the next recipe through a fresh search.
This only pays off if the save action is genuinely easy to find and use — buried behind an account creation wall before someone’s even decided they like the site tends to suppress usage. A lighter first touch (save without requiring an account, prompt for one only if they want collections to persist across devices) tends to get more actual use.
Reader recipe submissions
The submission feature lets visitors submit their own recipes through a frontend form, which land in a moderation queue rather than publishing directly — this is the part worth being deliberate about, since a completely open submission pipeline on any site is a route for spam and low-quality content, not just genuine reader contributions.
A submission form with no moderation step is a mistake regardless of the plugin — every open submission form on the internet attracts spam eventually, not sometimes. ChefMate’s moderation queue holds submissions for review before anything goes live, which is the right default, but it’s still a real, ongoing task: someone actually has to review the queue regularly, or it either stalls out (submitters get discouraged when nothing they submit ever appears) or gets rubber-stamped without real review (letting low-quality or off-topic content through).
The honest tradeoff with reader-submitted content
Reader recipes can genuinely extend a site’s content and community feel, but they also introduce quality variance you don’t fully control, and Google’s own guidance on user-generated content puts more scrutiny on it than on content the site’s own editors control directly. Worth having actual editorial standards for what gets approved — tested, complete, reasonably well-written — rather than approving everything that comes in just because the moderation queue exists.