How to import a recipe from a website

What you need

• Tableful on iPhone
• The URL of one recipe, not a category or a roundup
• A page that is not behind a paywall

Step by step

1. Copy the recipe’s URL

From Safari, tap the address bar and copy. From another app, use Share then Copy. Pick the page for the single dish: /recipes/lemon-chicken/ rather than /chicken-recipes/.

2. Paste it into Tableful

On the Today tab, tap Paste a link. If the URL is already on your clipboard, Tableful offers to import it as soon as you open the app.

3. Let it read the page

Most recipe sites publish structured recipe data for exactly this purpose, and Tableful reads that first: ingredients, times, yield, image and author, straight from the publisher. Plenty of good recipes live on blogs that publish nothing of the kind, and for those Tableful reads the page itself.

4. Check the ingredients and the yield

Published yields are optimistic. Set the servings to what the dish really feeds in your house, and the nutrition and grocery quantities follow.

5. Save it

The source link and the author stay attached. When you open the recipe later, “View source” takes you back to the original, which is where the notes and the comments are.

When it does not work

• You pasted a roundup. Pages like “35 chicken dinners” publish every dish’s ingredients merged into one list. That is not cookable and it wrecks the nutrition estimate, so Tableful refuses it. Open the individual recipe and import that.
• The page is paywalled. Tableful reads what a reader without a subscription can read, which on those sites is the headline. Screenshot the recipe from your own subscription instead.
• The site asks not to be read automatically. Tableful honours that and says so. Use Photograph a page on a screenshot, which is you reading a page you opened.
• The import came back thin. Some sites hide the recipe behind a “jump to recipe” widget that loads later. The print view of the page usually holds the whole thing in plain markup, and that URL imports cleanly.

Questions people ask

Does Tableful copy the writer’s recipe?

Tableful keeps the facts, which are the ingredients, the timing, the image and the credit. The method text belongs to whoever wrote it, so for sources that have not given permission it is fetched fresh when you save the recipe and never republished anywhere else.

Does it work with non-English sites?

Usually. The reading is done by a model rather than a fixed set of rules, so a Dutch or Greek recipe page generally imports with its ingredients intact.

What about a Facebook post?

Facebook does not let apps read a post, and the recipe is usually in a caption or a comment nobody can reach. Screenshot it and use the photo route.

Related guides

Scan a cookbook page: for anything a URL cannot give you.

Calculate the calories in a recipe: how the estimate is put together.

Turn a plan into a grocery list: where imported ingredients end up.

Save a recipe from YouTube: the other half of most recipe blogs.

Tableful vs Paprika: the classic web-clipping recipe manager, compared.

Reviewed September 2026. Tableful can only read content it can reach: private, deleted, region-restricted or paywalled posts may not be readable. Nutrition figures are estimates for meal decisions, not medical advice.