Cracking your knuckles and breathing a satisfied sigh of relief, you’re finally ready to send that all-important email to your clients. After one last quality check for good measure, you tap enter and head off to the kitchen for a well-earned coffee. But by afternoon, you’ve not had the hoped-for response. In fact, it’s been decidedly quiet. And then the error notifications start to roll in — your WordPress email provider is having deliverability issues and many of your messages have ended up in the spam folder, or haven’t been sent at all.
Why you need an SMTP provider for your WordPress email
WordPress’ standard email configuration is not designed for today’s rather aggressive spam filtering protocols. If you own a website that requires public registration — such as an eCommerce store or events ticketing portal — you’ll be required to dispatch many transactional emails. But if your WordPress website still uses the built-in email software — which defaults to PHP — you’re in danger of having much of these communications end up in the spam folder. This is compounded by the fact that many WordPress hosting companies haven’t set up their servers to properly deliver PHP emails!
To remedy this unreliable form of deliverability, we’d like to introduce you to the WordPress SMTP plugin. SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) is an industry standard for sending emails. Correct configuration helps enhance email deliverability by using authentication to defeat spammers. As the team at Kaira is constantly trying to improve our user experience, we’ve tried out many SMTP providers over the years and have since settled on our market-leading favourite:
WP Mail SMTP by WPForms
The WP Mail SMTP plugin is brought to you by the team responsible for innovative products like WPForms and analytics behemoth MonsterInsights (which we wrote about here). Their goal is to ensure your WordPress website emails arrive in client inboxes, on time and as expected.
Which is something they’ve become extremely good at — one million websites currently use the WP Mail SMTP plugin to deliver their WordPress email.
Why does Kaira recommend WP Mail SMTP for WordPress email?
Simply put, the WP Mail SMTP plugin is the most effective way of delivering your WordPress email communications reliably:
- Your WordPress website deploys an email to potential leads or customers.
- If your WordPress email server is improperly configured, the message could be blocked or shunted into the spam folder.
- The magic of the WP Mail SMTP plugin is getting these emails authenticated properly, and sending them via trusted third parties.
- The plugin also integrates with the best — most secure — SMTP providers. So if you’ve got a favourite, you won’t need to change.
- And what if something does go wrong? Not to worry! The plugin is backed by a first-rate customer service team that offers White Glove setup and priority support.
Image courtesy of WP Mail SMTP
Features that enhance your WordPress email experience
WP Mail SMTP’s simple setup and integration means you can deploy emails in mere minutes, with support from a team of specialists with years of experience in the industry. The plugin integrates with the following popular email providers:
Pepipost: It takes just a few clicks to connect your account to WP Mail SMTP and enjoy service that delivers 8 billion emails from 20,000+ customers every month.
Mailgun: Using MailGun to deploy your emails? No problem — the WP Mail SMTP plugin provides a native integration for it. Just connect your MailGun account, and you’re good to go.
SendGrid: WP Mail SMTP offers native integration for simple, secure set up of this free, reliable SMTP provider.
Gmail: Unlike alternative Gmail SMTP plugins, WP Mail SMTP’s Gmail SMTP uses OAuth to authenticate your Google account. This safeguards your login information and makes it 100% secure.
Microsoft: WP Mail SMTP integrates with Microsoft’s suite of tools, meaning you can use your existing Outlook.com or Office 365 account to send your emails without having to stress about spam folders or other deliverability issues.
Amazon SES: Our favourite plugin helps advanced users enhance their email functionality with Amazon SES integration that connects seamlessly with AWS.
Others:
The WP Mail SMTP plugin seamlessly integrates with all leading email services, including Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook, Microsoft Live, and any additional sending services that use SMTP.
But the magic doesn’t end there! Over and above the native Microsoft and Amazon SES integrations, the plugin’s Pro package offers additional powerful features and services:
White Glove setup: The experienced team behind this stellar plugin will deal with your WP Mail SMTP plugin installation and setup, as well as configuration to your DNS for correct email domain name verification.
Email logging: This allows users to log and view all emails deployed from your WordPress website. Email logs are essential to keep track of your records, audit outgoing emails, and to debug when your website’s being developed.
WordPress notification management: With the Manage Notification feature, users get full control over which email notifications WordPress they receive. For example: if you don’t want to get a notification when a new user profile is created, you can simply disable the trigger.
Pricing and packages
In comparison to alternatives, WP Mail SMTP is very cost-effective:
To see what’s included in each package, you can view the full pricing list here.
Conclusion
WordPress is made stronger by community and collaboration. This means that your WordPress ecosystem can be enhanced by the themes, plugins and specialists you choose to bring into the fold. In our opinion, the WP Mail SMTP plugin is the most effective way to ensure your WordPress email is fast, reliable and secure.
Kaira has been developing WordPress websites for over a decade. This means we know market-leaders when we see them. For innovative plugins, extensions and integrations to build beautiful websites, contact us here to chat to a consultant. For an example of our work, check out Elation, our lightest, fastest and newest theme.
