If you are having trouble getting emails delivered that are sent from your site, there are some things that you can try in order to improve the process. In this guide, we will walk you through how to solve the most common issues that may cause emails to not get delivered.
Step 1: Are emails being sent from WordPress?
The first step in troubleshooting the problem is to establish whether or not WordPress is sending out your emails.
Sometimes we find that due to server configuration issues, WordPress is not able to send out emails from your server. By default, WordPress uses the PHP Mail function – so if this is not setup properly you may experience issues.
Some Managed WordPress hosts like WP Engine, Cloudways, and others do not provide any email services, so you’ll need to use a 3rd party app such as Mandrill, SendGrid, or Sparkpost (Zoho and Google Apps may work also) to have a way to send emails from your WordPress installation.
Option 1 – Test if the emails are being sent (test emails from WP)
You can go to WordPress > Users and select “Add New”. Add some new user details and enter an email address you can check easily. Complete the other main fields including name, email and password. Ensure that you tick the “Send the new user an email about their account.” to send yourself the new login information.
This will send the password setup email to the email you specified. Ensure that you check spam and junk folders and it is advisable that if you find the email in the spam or junk you mark it as “Not Spam”. See below for more tips on improving email deliverability to your users inboxes.
Option 2 – Testing if emails are being sent (test using Check & Log Email WordPress Plugin)
The “Check & Log Email” plugin will show you a log of all emails sent from your WordPress installation. To install the plugin, login to your site and navigate to “Plugins > Add New” and type in the search bar the plugin name Check & Log Email, and Click “Install now”.
Then activate the plugin by clicking “Activate”
Now you’ll see a new admin menu for “Check & Log Email” – Hover over it and click on “Settings”
We’ll need to turn on the Logging, so click the “Logging” tab there and click the “Save” button.
Now we’ll need to send a test email. Just type your email address and click “Send Test Email” (no need to change any settings for that).
You may also do one of the following instead of sending the test email from the plugin:
- Create an optin form using the “email data” integration and testing it
- Create a contact form element and send a test submission.
- Place a test or live order using an OptimizePress Checkout form element.
- Create a new user in WordPress and check the box to send an email to the new user.
Once you run some of those tests, then you may come back to the Check & Log Email log and see what was sent. If you see the emails in this log that you tried to send, then WordPress is successfully sending the emails to your web server.
If you are finding that emails are not being received, you should consider speaking to your host and asking if they can check if PHPMail/WPMail is working properly.
Step 2: Improving Deliverability (Stop emails going to spam).
You’ll want to ensure you are not using email addresses that end in @gmail.com, @yahoo.com, @hotmail.com, or other similar email providers. You should be using an email @yourdomain.com instead. Also make sure you use the @yourdomain.com email in your settings for the Checkouts, Mentor, and WordPress General Settings.
By default, WordPress and OptimizePress will use the local email server to send emails. Sometimes this can cause issues with the recipient receiving those emails. Email servers may not “trust” your server to send emails and it could mark those emails as spam (or simply not deliver them at all).
To avoid these possible issues, you can configure WordPress to send all email using the SMTP server for the “From” address. Configuring WordPress with your SMTP server details will allow WordPress to authenticate all sent emails with the proper SMTP server.
You can do this by installing and configuring the Easy WP SMTP plugin.
To install the Easy WP SMTP plugin, navigate to “Plugins > Add new” and type “Easy WP SMTP” in the search bar. Then click “Install now”
Then activate the plugin.
Now click the settings link at the top of the Plugins area in WordPress (or click “settings” under the plugin title below).
Now, you will have to get the SMTP information from your web host or where you are hosting your email account. Once you enter the information just click the save button at the very bottom.
NOTE: This plugin only works with SMTP connections. If you are using Office 365 or Gmail Suite then you may need to consider other plugins (there are many to choose from). Or you can try a freemium plugin (free version with optional paid version) to get what you need. The WP Mail SMTP plugin may cover most needs, but if you just need simple SMTP then the plugin above is fine.
After you configure the SMTP options on your site, please run more tests like we did in Step 1 at the beginning of this guide. If you still have issues with getting emails to your inbox then it might be time to consider reaching out to our team for further help or using a different web host.
Other Tips
Another tip to help you improve your chances of making the inbox is by editing the email so it’s unique instead of having the default template. OptimizePress Checkouts and Mentor plugins both have email templates that are editable. We highly suggest editing them to make sure your emails are unique and to avoid using any spam sounding email subject lines.
The above processes should help solve most email problems. We would be happy to help with this through support if you still can not find a solution to this problem.