How to Setup WordPress SMTP for Sending Emails

Thank you so much for watching the Press Avenue YouTube channel my name is John and today we're talking about sending emails from WordPress now I get a question a lot where people say I know I got a notification from maybe a contact form or I received a payment from a client but I never got the email so maybe they're using WP forms or gravity forms and they have set everything up and WordPress is simply not getting the notification to their inbox this can be scary if you're doing payment stuff maybe they're not getting the receipt maybe you're not getting a new lead for our clients you definitely want to make sure that you are getting these notices and notifications from WordPress so one thing about WordPress if you don't know it's not great at sending emails so it uses the PHP mailer function which we won't really get into but what it comes down to is sometimes and a lot of the time it drops the ball when it needs to get those messages to you so what do you do about it thankfully there's a great plug-in called WP or WordPress SMTP or SMTP Pro this allows you to guarantee the deliverability of that notice email lead payment etc from your WordPress website and today we're going to go ahead and set it up show you the different options that are available and jump into the weeds of setting it up thank you so much for watching Before we jump into it go ahead and hit that red subscribe button if you want to see more WordPress tutorials just like this all right and lastly I'll say facebook.com slash Group slash press Avenue is where we further discuss all tutorials so I'll post the videos on here and then if you have additional questions need follow-up want to share your link etc you can do so within this group which has been really great I got 525 ish people at the point of this video and it's growing more and more each day alright so getting into it the plugin is called WP Mail SMTP buy WP forms I believe WP forms acquired it and has transformed it into a fantastic product it's got this little pigeon guy at the top there are other options but you're really looking for this bird when searching the repo within WordPress itself so has a description here if you have problems sending emails this is it our goal is to make email deliverability easy and reliable which is what we want and why we're here they have a website as well WP Mail SMTP calm and has more features and stuff talking about the pro version of this they do a white glove setup which is fantastic and the pro version let's check it out as of this video they have for 50 bucks it allows you to the Amazon SES basically the email simple email service in a space what that's called I'm you can do Gmail actually you can do these without it office 365 and you get support $4.99 you can do all the same thing which includes a white glove setup which is basically where you say hey I want office 365 to work here's my details they do it all for you there's actually really great for a plugin author they verify your email are your DNS verification here and then everything from their developer and agencies all the same stuff just for 20 sites or a hundred sites so that's the pro in this one I'll be setting up the free version and then also talking about the pro as we go along so we go back to the WordPress one these are all these services that this connects to and you can see here if you want to do outlook calm or office 365 it says Pro so you need the pro one but all these other ones you can do on the free one now they recommend peppy post which I've never heard of and I did look up send in blue same thing never heard of it but did look it up I typically have used mailgun and SendGrid and of course you use Gmail because a lot of people do use Gmail and then we'll go from there and then all other is if you host your own email server you can put in the credentials there and use that as well so let's get into it so go ahead and log into our WordPress dashboard and we'll go to plugins and then add new give it a minute we're gonna search for WP SMTP enter and then again you look for that pigeon so there's tons of other ones to do the same thing this one's been the most reliable their supports great and I always look for this right here 1 plus million active installations that's pretty good the next one 400,000 don't get me wrong it is excellent but the ones with more active installations and last updated is really what I look for when installing plugins so go ahead and hit install this has already been backed up and saved so I don't have to worry about installing this and having an issue and if it does we'll fix it right now but usually is not an issue I have something called WP rocket it's a caching plugin and I just clear the cache every time install something new so coming down here on the side there's a ton on this particular website but down here it says WP mail SMTP so we're gonna go ahead and click that and we're gonna set this up so it says thanks for installing it you need to configure a mailer which is what we're going to get to but up here at the top general is just filling out the general information I'm go ahead and delete this for now email test sends an email test email a log you can't see unless you have the pro version so the log says I sent the email to John and press Avenue and it didn't work and you can dig through the logs and figure out why email controls you don't get any controls with a free one you get all the control with the pro one which makes sense and finally the miscellaneous um you can read these you can hide the announcements you can hide errors when you uninstall this this will remove everything you can check that and I can show you these ones as well so the controls it basically says if you want to unlock comment notifications user change notification it's automatic updates new users personal data requests all the kind of requests that you can get from WordPress notifications this will allow basically this to handle that and send it to you with the pro version excuse me and the log um so this is what you see you'll see email logs and view logs and then what I don't like about it was when you click these the menu disappears so you can I kind of go back and then we'll go to back to general here all right so license key I'm using the lite version or the free version no license needed enjoy if you want to unlock more features there it is and then lastly you can get 20% off if you install this and click here which is kind of a bonus all right the from email you would fill in here so it would be contact info services whatever you want at your domain comm which would be the from email if you want to force everything to come from that and said the admin you can do that here you would put in your name I'll just leave it and then again you can force the name so instead of it saying WordPress it'll be from this particular service is called silver key next return path this is for bouncing just this right here it indicates where there are non delivery receipts or bounce messages are to be sent so that's up to you and finally mailer and this is why you're here so PHP if you just turn this plugin on and do nothing it's still using that PHP mailer function which you don't want because then there was no point to doing any of this they again recommend Pepe post and send in Baloo if you want a free way to send emails send in blue allows you to do 300 emails a day which is actually a ton mailgun does in their trial you can do 10,000 and then in their free version after the trial is done it's a hundred a day and then SendGrid is also a hundred a day so those of you have kind of free options when you first get into this additionally other smtp is free and then Google is Gmail as free as well but if you didn't want to use your Gmail or you didn't have an other SMTP so another mail server that you're using send in blue mail gun and SendGrid are your free options and this one we're gonna use SendGrid i've always used them in the past what I like about them is when setting this up for clients and this is a client site mail gun is great too but it needs a phone number verification and that can sometimes get tricky because you got to find a phone number that can get the verification message so it has to be attacked a text can't be a landline Twilio SendGrid it's just an e-mail verification so so's mail gun but you don't have that phone number option so it sways here to set up for other people and then you just need the API key I will say hey John mail gun and sender and have their own WordPress plugins they are a total crap um this does a way better job than the one Senger created and the one mail had created I've done both actually got fed up with mail guns WordPress plug-in switch to send grid realize that there's isn't any good either found this which solves the problem for them they should just pay these guys alright so send grid so SendGrid says I need an account and an API key so that's what I'm gonna do I'm going to go over to SendGrid site so just send grid comm let it load this way bigger for you guys um it does a ton of stuff basically what we're looking for is transactional emails and we just need an API key so they have all these products and services email automation design templates newsletters whatever you want but if we look down here free so we can send out 40,000 emails every 30 days and it's just the trial and then a hundred a day forever so a hundred a day really does cover a ton of people if you're doing more than a hundred a day you would then have to pay and you can shop around but if we're looking here let's see this is 10,000 now it's more than that well it's a take for the price too oh there we go alright so for 1495 you can send 50 thousand emails a month so it's just over a thousands a day which is pretty cheap so if you're doing fifty thousand emails in a month I'm sure you can afford the 14.95 a month estimate and then it basically gives you the same stuff as the free so you can get support which is insane analytics and editor but we don't need any of this we just need this first one right here API key so we're gonna go to start for free I'll make this bigger Sam block all this um and then go ahead and sign up so you don't see my password username and everything else so what did you miss I created a username and password then it asks for first name company email and then asks you if you're the CEO or a developer your title then asks how many emails do you think you're gonna send a day and then how can you use this and then you hit submit and it kicks you into this dashboard here now as far as the verifications it sends out an email you just got to click the link it pops you back here and now you're verified so that's easy mail guns the same thing except that you then verify with a phone number which is sometimes a painting so here we go send your first email integrate using our Web API that's what we want so hit start brings us into here what do you want to do um see I haven't verified at the top here um I want to do the Web API so there's again a million other things you can do and then how do you want to do it I'm gonna say PHP we really just want the number we actually don't need the code so I'll hit choose and then you name your key so it says make sure you're using at least PHP five point six or seven point O or seven point one two three it doesn't matter so five point six anything before that doesn't work and then seven point zero one two and three all work create a name for the key so you put in your website name and then you hit create key which obviously I'm gonna block and then you copy it and then the rest is just code on how to use it which we don't need because we're using this plugin so go back to settings API key paste save so that's my password notification all right so now it says saved successfully and then we come down here and then it just shows a beacon I keep pulling it out then to test this I can go to test and then I'll put in don't email me just Facebook me on the group I get two man emails as it is so put in your email address do you want it to be HTML or Appliance up to you hit Send now go check your inbox to see if it came in so this says it was successful I've set up other ones with like office 365 where if one setting is wrong you'll get a huge error saying hey hey hey something's wrong you got to check this that and the other you go and correct it and then it works anyway that is it what's nice is once you set up this API you set up the plug-in which there's not much to it you hit save now you're guaranteeing that all of those notifications get to your inbox your clients inbox whoever's inbox which is really nice and then within SendGrid you can see those reports like hey this didn't work or it did work if you want to see it within WP male SMTP you would get the pro which is pretty inexpensive for what this stuff is of what it does because it does a lot of heavy lifting for you all right well that's it my name is John bunka thank you again for watching the press Avenue YouTube channel be sure to connect with us on Facebook facebook.com slash Group slash press Avenue go ahead and give us that thumbs up if you like this and also let me know in the comments if you are able to use this if you do use it or if you have any questions thanks again for watching