How To Set Up Rich Pins on WordPress (and why you should)

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What the heck are rich pins, right? This is the exact same question I asked myself a few years ago.

Well, it turns out rich pins are a pretty cool thing! The next question that immediately popped up in my mind? How to set up rich pins on WordPress, of course!

But first comes first…

WHAT ARE PINTEREST RICH PINS

Rich pins are simply (your) pins that carry additional information depending on your pin’s type.

Additional info = more keywords (which you smartly use in your titles and descriptions) = higher ranking and a better chance for your pins to be shown upon search!

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Pssst, did you know that keywords are one of the three essential elements of Pinterest management?

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So, it means they tell pinners even more about your content, which is why it is highly recommended (or I’ll go as far as to say absolutely necessary) to enable rich pins on Pinterest if you’re a business owner or a blogger.

Pinterest recognizes three different types of rich pins:

Article rich pins – include additional information about you (author) and article
Recipe rich pins – include additional information about the recipe, such as ingredients, cook time, etc.
Product rich pins – include additional information about your product, such as price and where to buy it

WHAT ARE THE BENEFITS OF ENABLING THE RICH PINS

I mentioned it already, but here it goes again – your pins provide additional information to pinners (below and above the image on closeup) and carry more keywords
Titles of your pins become bold, which means they stand out amongst other “normal” pins on Pinterest feed, and this increases the chance of your pin being noticed
Rich pins synchronize metadata (information) from your website, so if, for example, recipe changes, this will be reflected on an existing pin, too!*

*If you’re in the US or UK, information about Product rich pins is shown only if you’re on Pinterest’s list of verified merchants and product is in stock.

HOW TO SET UP RICH PINS ON WORDPRESS

There are two prerequisites for enabling rich pins:

You need to have a Pinterest business account
Your website should be claimed on Pinterest*

*Awesome news: If you’re on Squarespace, Shopify, or have an Etsy or Big Cartel store, rich pins are enabled automatically once you claim your website. And if you’re on Wix, rich pins are automatically added to your blog posts or product pages, yay! *performing victory dance*

Enabling rich pins is as simple as claiming your website on Pinterest, so technophobes don’t need to worry at all (I feel you). This blog post is focused on WordPress websites, but if you need help with enabling rich pins for any other platform, you can reach out anytime!

Here’s how to set up rich pins on Pinterest on the WordPress website in just a few steps:

STEP 1: Add metadata to the content of your site.

Er – what? No no, it’s not as scary as it sounds, I promise. Actually, there are two ways to do that, but I’m gonna assume that most of us here are common mortals who are not on the best terms with web development.

If you’re tech-savvy or would like your website to be as plugin-less as possible, you might want to opt for adding the meta tag straight to your Open Graph or Schema.org formats (here is the link with instructions)

i) Install Yoast SEO plugin. (Go to your Dashboard –>Plugins –>Add New –> type Yoast SEO in the search bar and click Install and Activate)

ii) Once the Yoast SEO plugin is activated, open the plugin’s Social Tab and navigate to the Facebook Tab.

iii) Make sure that Open Graph Meta Data is set to Enabled (which it should be already if you were following my instructions about claiming your website on Pinterest 😊). Click Save Changes

–> This process is relevant for the Article Rich pins. If you have recipes on your website, I suggest adding another plugin to your website – Tasty Recipes. Once this plugin is installed and you populate its fields (Title, Description & Ingredients), Pinterest will pull data from those fields.

STEP 2: Go to the Rich Pins Validator

URL: https://developers.pinterest.com/tools/url-debugger/

STEP 3: Choose one page (any page aside from your website’s homepage) and paste the chosen URL and click Validate.

That’s it, you’re done; rich pins should now be enabled on your website!

A PRO TIP:

After enabling rich pins, all pins across your website should be rich pins. It may happen from time to time that Pinterest will not automatically update your article or that pins from a particular page or blog post will not appear as rich pins. To ensure that rich pins are enabled on this article or manually enable them, enter the article’s URL into Rich Pin Validator and click Validate.

Green ticks next to URL info, and the Congratulations! message should appear.

If a particular page can’t be validated, a red notification will appear, and you should follow the instruction to solve the issue.

Admit it, this was a piece of cake, wasn’t it? 🙂

Share this with your biz besties!

Sandra Stanisa

Sandra is your travel-obsessed, coffee-loving Pinterest & Canva Expert (with a zillion other digital-marketing-related passions). She is a self-proclaimed Pinterest addict and a founder of Sandra S. Media, a boutique marketing agency that helps bloggers and creatives scale their businesses through strategic Pinterest marketing and design.