You don’t have to be an internet guru to properly setup and send email through your WordPress website. Ever run into the problem where your WordPress website looks fantastic, but your contact forms just won’t send email? I’m sure that has happened to you on more then one occasion. The truth is, that with so many different hosting providers WordPress uses the standard PHP protocol to try and send email. This protocol is know as PHP Mail. You also probably didn’t know that using your hosting provider as a relay in not entirely dependable. Getting your website to use PHP Mail and deliver your email correctly with so many different hosting provider environments can be a tough task. Because of this, many users and developers choose to use another method of sending email then PHP mail protocol. We call this SMTP relaying. To put it in simpler terms, rather then using your hosting server for email, we can use Gmail (for example) to send email from our WordPress website. There is a lot of benefits to that.
Now before I go into the details of setting all of this up, let’s take a look quickly at the different types of services we have that offer us SMTP relaying, that we can easily use;
Gmail
Gmail we already know is free and with the usage of a plugin. We are able to configure our WordPress plugin to use our current registered Gmail Email to send messages to us and our customers from your website. This means that WordPress will send any form email, notices, alerts, and all other emails through our email.
Mandrill
Mandrill is another awesome service with a much more direct approach to email relaying, but it is also not free any more. Depending how much email you send through your website, from forms and website notifications, it could end up costing you at minimum $20. Now, they offer other packages but I know that you will probably not max the $20 plan that offers 500k emails. In any case, it is a very reliable service and easy to configure.
Sendgrid
Sendgrid on the other hand comes with a handful of options for email relay. It offers detailed analytics in regards to each and every message that is send or received. It is also capable of storing your contacts as a Marketing Campaign effort. Once again, it is a paid option, but with a lower price point of only $10 per month for up to 40,000 emails. In most cases, way more then enough for any website.
So now that we did a quick look and review of the available STMP Relay services that we can use with our WordPress plugin with our WordPress website, let’s take a look which plugin is best to use and how to configure it.
WordPress Website SMTP Configuration
With the above quick review of SMTP services to relay and send our emails from our WordPress website, lets take a look at one specific WordPress plugin that will assist us and connect our service. Let’s focus on a WordPress plugin called Easy WordPress SMTP. There is many other plugins available, but here at Kenton Web Design Studio, we believe this one is just the right one with very simple configuration.
The first thing you will want to do is setup your plugin by installing it on your WordPress website. Simple, right?
