Have you ever had trouble with your email in WordPress not delivering? Well you’re not alone because this is a common problem for WordPress websites. It was the bane of my existence. I spent many sleepless nights and frustrating days wondering how to make my email on WordPress work the way it was supposed to. I was almost pulling my hair out trying to figure it out. After multiple support calls to my host provider and watching many YouTube videos I was finally able to figure it out. This is a free solution you can use for your WordPress website.
The bottom line is your regular mail is set up on PHP, which WordPress doesn’t like. When you send an email from your website it is blocked, so it doesn’t get to the recipient. For example, a user completes a Contact Us Form on your website and presses the submit button. It says the form was sent, but you never get the form completed by your customer. This has a huge negative impact on your business. Are you telling me your host provider doesn’t know about this? I doubt it. Trust me, if I know about it they know about it too. However, they want you to pay extra, so they can fix it for you. Knowing what I know now, it would have taken them about 10 minutes to resolve the issue. However, I was stubborn and wanted to figure it out for myself, so now I’m passing this knowledge onto you.
WP Mail SMTP Plugin
You need to download this plugin. You can use the free plan here. If you use the free plan you don’t need to paste in the API key.
Launch Setup Wizard and follow the instructions. Make sure your from email is your website address. It is recommended that you get a domain email address that matches your domain. For example, [email protected]
Under Mailer select SendinBlue.
For those that haven’t heard of them Sendinblue is a popular email marketing platform. They offer a range of features and integrations to help businesses create and send emails, SMS messages, and automated marketing campaigns.
SendinBlue Mailer
You will need to select a Mailer. I chose SendinBlue. You can use the free plan if you want. Go to SendinBlue’s website and create an account. You will need to generate an API key. Do NOT confuse the SMTP key with the API key as I did. If you do, it won’t work.
Once you generate the API key code in SendinBlue paste it into the WP Mail SMTP Plugin where indicated. You can use the Wizard to set everything up. Make sure to save settings at the bottom.
You are done with the WP Mail SMTP Plugin, but you need to do more on the SendinBlue account. This was the part that I missed originally. You will need to add domain records to your host to verify your domain. Check SendinBlue documentation for this. By the way, SendinBlue was professional and super responsive. They responded to my email almost immediately and I didn’t even have the paid plan.
Also, don’t forget to enable SMTP on your host. Mine was enabled for PHP. Why would your host enable it for PHP when they know that doesn’t work?
After all this I sent a few test emails and everything worked great! This was the first time I was able to send email from my website. Just take your time and do everything step by step and it will work for you too.
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