• Get In Touch
January 16, 2018

How To Troubleshoot Common WordPress Email Problems

Using Wordpress? Get our lightening fast Wordpress Optimised Hosting.
Get Wordpress Hosting

Occasionally your WordPress site might experience trouble sending emails reliably. This can happen for a wide variety of reasons, and narrowing down the problem can be difficult. This article will walk you through some basic steps to understand why your site is having trouble and what you can do about it.

How Does WordPress Send Emails?

In order to properly troubleshoot your email situation, you need first to understand how email works in WordPress generally.

By default, WordPress uses PHP to send all mail from your website. This is a somewhat different means of communication than standard emails. This means that your server (your host) has to support PHP mail in order for your WordPress emails to be sent.

When you install WordPress for the first time, you are asked to provide a name and email address for the first user of the website. This is your primary administrator account and the email you choose here will be used to send all administrative emails from your website. It’s best to choose an email address from your domain name, rather than a Gmail or Hotmail address.

Testing Your Emal Configuration

Let’s find out now if your site is able to send an email at all. The easiest way to do that is with a simple plugin called “Check Email”. Simply install that, then go to “Tools > Check Email”.  You’ll see a screen like this:

The “Check Email” plugin allows you to easily confirm whether or not your WordPress website is able to send emails reliably. It provides you with some handy information about your environment at the top, then a simple form to send a test email. If you send that to an address you have access to and it sends successfully, then you know that your site is capable of effectively sending emails.

Reasons Why Emails Might Not Be Sending Correctly

Now that we know a bit about how WordPress sends emails, and we know how to test whether emails are being sent correctly, what do we do if emails are not being sent at all?

Double Check Your Admin Email Address. 

Some hosts require that all email sent from the server are from your root level domain address. For example, if your site is greatcause.org and your Admin email address is greatcause@gmail.com, your server might refuse to send the emails that WordPress generates. To change this, simply go to “Settings > General” and update the field called “Email Address.”

Verify Your Email Address Is Registered Correctly. 

Some hosts prevent email from sending if it is not properly registered in your account. For example, you might have an email address registered in your hosting account (or cPanel), but your WordPress site is sending from another email address which is not registered at all. Some hosts will prevent any mail from being sent out from your site unless it is registered properly.

If you’ve done all of that and you still have trouble, there’s one final thing you can do which has a virtual 99.9% success rate….

Sending Email From Your WordPress Site via SMTP

SMTP is the most reliable way to send email from a web server. It is not at all like PHP mail or wp_mail. It is secure and reliable. But how do you configure your WordPress site to use SMTP instead of PHP mail? We suggest using the Post SMTP plugin. This is a great plugin because it provides a step-by-step walkthrough for configuring your email for SMTP. This video covers exactly how it walks you through the process of setting up sending emails via SMTP using a Google SMTP API:

Using Wordpress? Get our lightening fast Wordpress Optimised Hosting.
Get Wordpress Hosting

Share this Article!

Related Posts

5 Website Hosting Solution Trends for 2022 and Beyond

5 Website Hosting Solution Trends for 2022 and Beyond

Looking for the right web hosting solution for your website can be an intimidating task. Options nowadays are more diversified than ever, and each year brings new developments in the web hosting market. If you have no clue of what to look out for, you can find yourself overwhelmed with the choices. Hence, you must […]

64 Content Marketing Statistics Demonstrating the Power of Content

64 Content Marketing Statistics Demonstrating the Power of Content

Content marketing continues to be one of the most valuable tools for today’s online businesses. With content, you can improve your chances of reaching your target audience, boost your search engine standing, and even unlock new opportunities for sales. The more content you produce, the more you can strengthen your domain authority, demonstrate your thought […]

53 User Experience Stats for 2022

53 User Experience Stats for 2022

User Experience (UX) is one of the most crucial factors to consider in web design. As the number of websites and applications in the world today continues to accelerate, businesses are under more pressure than ever to impress customers straight away. If a user visits your website and finds slow-loading pages, clunky navigation, or errors, […]

How to increase the memory limit in WordPress

How to increase the memory limit in WordPress

Do you need to increase the memory limit in WordPress? Getting an error about memory Exhausted? The memory limit is one of the most common WordPress errors as the default limit of memory in WordPress is only set to 64mb! But there’s good news! The Memory Exhausted error is one of the easiest to fix […]

All in One WordPress Migration Vulnerability

All in One WordPress Migration Vulnerability

A vulnerability has been discovered in the “All In One WordPress Migration” WordPress plugin. All versions earlier than, and including 6.97 contain a vulnerability which allows Cross-Site Scripting (XSS). With over 2 million active installations, this vulnerability has the potential to be high impact, however, this is lessened by the nature of the vulnerability, which […]