Rich pins are enhanced Pinterest pins, or the visual bookmarks people use to save, organize, and curate information on the social platform. Rich pins pull information directly from your website and automatically display it on Pinterest.
A regular pin can display an image and a description. A rich pin can display extra information—such as your product’s price or stock status—as well as sync that information in real-time from your website. Rich Pins remove the need for manual updates, which makes shopping and content discovery on Pinterest more accurate for users and easier to manage for brands. For example, if you’re running a sale, setting up rich pins means the new price will reflect automatically on Pinterest.
Here are the different types of Pinterest rich pins you can create, how rich pins work, and steps to take to enable rich pins on your website.
What are rich pins?
Rich pins use metadata from your website—tags about a product’s title, description, price, and availability—to automatically fill in the information shown to Pinterest users before they click through to your website. The metadata used to populate rich pins is the same data brands input for search engine optimization (SEO) purposes.
For Pinterest users, the biggest difference between a rich pin and a standard pin is the amount of information included. A standard pin typically shows only an image and a short description. A rich pin can include more comprehensive information above and below the main image when you click into it.
For a small business owner, the biggest difference is that rich pins are dynamic. Pinterest reads your tags and refreshes the pin, so as soon as you update something on your website, like a product price or description, any rich pins featuring that product will automatically reflect those updates within 24 hours.
Rich pin types
There are three types of rich pins, and each shares different categories of information on Pinterest:
Product rich pins
Product rich pins show detailed information about a product for sale on your website. Beyond a product’s name, image, description, and link, this type of rich pin can also display an item’s current price and availability. Note that Pinterest only displays that information if the item is in stock and your account meets its merchant guidelines.
Article rich pins
Any text-based page, from a news article to a blog post, can be turned into an article rich pin, which includes the headline, description, and author. As with all pins, an article rich pin has a central image or visual element. Instead of requiring a manually uploaded image, article rich pins will use the primary image from your article or blog post.
Recipe rich pins
Recipe rich pins show detailed information for recipes from your website. When a user saves your recipe on Pinterest, they won’t just see the recipe name and image. Instead, recipe pins will include specifications such as the required ingredients, cook time, and serving size, in addition to the recipe’s title and main image.
It can also include ratings and relevant diet preferences, such as whether a recipe is vegan. Recipe pins can be helpful for food bloggers, food and beverage publications, or brands that publish recipes featuring their product on their site.
How to create rich pins
- Claim your website
- Add metadata to your web pages
- Test to confirm you can generate rich pins
- Review your rich pins for accuracy
Pinterest previously gated rich pins behind an application; you ran a page through its rich pin validator, clicked Apply, and waited for approval. This validation process no longer exists. Instead, Pinterest reads your meta tags when it crawls your page to create new pins; existing pins can convert into rich pins too. Here’s how to set it up:
1. Claim your website
Claiming your website confirms to Pinterest that you own a specific domain. To claim your website, you must first be able to access and edit your website’s source code.
There are four ways to claim your website:
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Connecting your Pinterest account to Google Merchant Center
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Adding an HTML tag to your website’s source code
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Adding an HTML file to your web server
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Adding a DNS text record to your website’s DNS records
To use any of these methods, navigate to Settings in your Pinterest business menu, then go to Claimed Accounts and follow the prompts to claim your website.
If you have the Pinterest for Shopify app, you can bypass most of this process. Once you connect your Pinterest account to your Shopify store through the app, your website will automatically be claimed.
2. Add metadata to your web pages
Any web page you want to turn into a rich pin must have the appropriate structured metadata added to it. You can add these meta tags to your site in one of two formats: Open Graph or Schema.org. Either one can be used for product rich pins or article rich pins, but you’ll need to use the Schema.org format when working with recipe rich pins.
The rich pin data you add will vary depending on the pin type. Pinterest specifies what metadata you should include for product pins, article pins, and recipe pins. For recipe rich pins, specifically, your website needs recipe metadata structured in a way that Pinterest can read. One of the most common ways to do this for recipes is to use a recipe card plug-in, such as Recipe Card Blocks Pro or WP Recipe Maker.
If you have a large website, adding structured metadata to every web page takes time. Some ecommerce platforms and CMS plug-ins do this for you. Shopify product pages already include the metadata for product rich pins. If you have a WordPress website, the Yoast SEO plug-in adds Open Graph tags across your website; under your Yoast Settings, enable Open Graph metadata under Site Features.
When writing metadata for your website, be detailed and specific. Use relevant, descriptive keywords that help Pinterest understand what your content is, and keep the language natural rather than packing the fields with marketing copy. Pinterest users read some of this data as they scroll past your rich pins, so it should be accurate and communicate quickly what someone will find on your page if they click.
3. Test to confirm you can generate rich pns
Once you’ve added the appropriate structured metadata to the web pages you want to turn into rich pins, test one to confirm you’ve entered the data correctly. Take the link from a web page that has the required metadata fields filled out, then save the link as a pin on Pinterest. If you have a Shopify store, you can use the link from any of your product pages. Open the pin to confirm that Pinterest has successfully created a rich pin.
If your link doesn’t turn into a rich pin or has important fields missing (such as a product title or ingredients for a recipe), check your web page’s metadata. Confirm that you’ve used a data format that Pinterest can read (Schema.org or Open Graph) and that you’ve filled all the required fields for your rich pin type.
If your web page has a paywall or requires a login, this could also cause issues when creating a rich pin, as Pinterest can’t read metadata that isn’t public. Finally, if you update metadata to correct it, give Pinterest at least 24 hours before you check your rich pin again. This will give the platform enough time to re-crawl your website.
4. Review your rich pins for accuracy
If you add metadata to your web pages manually, you’ll need to regularly check your rich pins to make sure the information they display is correct and update the metadata on the appropriate web page if needed.
If you use Shopify, your product titles, descriptions, pricing, availability, and images will sync automatically with your rich pins when you edit a product page. Yoast metadata also updates when you change details on your pages.
Even if your metadata is generated automatically, it’s best practice to review your rich pins every few months or after you make any major website changes, such as a platform migration.
If an article or recipe rich pin pulls a title or description that reads awkwardly next to your image, you can edit those fields on the pin itself. What you write will overwrite the metadata Pinterest pulled from your site. For product rich pins, Pinterest pulls product fields from your page or catalog feed, so that’s where you’d make any changes.
Rich pins FAQ
What is the difference between rich pins and standard pins?
They differ in how much information they have and where the information comes from. Rich pins can feature special information for products (such as price) or articles (such as author). They pull information directly from the structured metadata on a web page, which means rich pins update automatically. When creating a standard pin, you’ll need to manually enter details like a title, description, and image.
Do rich pins update automatically?
Yes, rich pins automatically update if you have a Shopify store or use the Yoast plug-in. The metadata that supplies information for rich pins will sync when you change any details on a web page, and your rich pin for that web page will automatically update, which can take up to 24 hours.
Do you need a website to use rich pins?
Yes, you need a website to use rich pins. Pinterest generates rich pins by reading a web page’s metadata, so you must use a URL that has the required metadata fields filled out to create a rich pin.