How to Use Gmail SMTP Server to Send Email in WordPress

Email sending and email list building are two of the imperative marketing strategies for WordPress sites. If you own a WordPress blog, you probably send newsletters and updates about the content on your site to your subscribers. However, if you have been using the default WordPress email account to send emails through your web host, you might have struggled at least once. As WordPress fails to deliver the emails to recipients on various occasions due to unknown errors, many owners move to the more reliable Gmail SMTP server for sending emails.

In this tutorial, we’d like to discuss the reasons to use Gmail SMTP server instead of WordPress default functions for sending emails, followed by the procedure to do so.

Why Should Not Send Email from WordPress Site Directly

There are several reasons as to why you shouldn’t use the WordPress site directly for sending emails. Firstly, as WordPress uses PHP to send emails, your emails might land on the spam folder of the recipient; making your email marketing strategy ineffective.

Secondly, many hosting providers set a limit on sending emails to multiple recipients at a time. Due to this, you have to spend a lot of time in repeating sending newsletters to dozens of subscribers.

Lastly, the emails you send through the hosting provider might not reach the recipients due to some technical issues.

Why Should Use a SMTP Server to Send Your WordPress Emails

To start with, the SMTP or the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol is an efficient platform that sends emails through the web using a secure and reliable network. When you use a SMTP server of any mail service that is widely recognized, the scope for errors and minor issues are minimum.

To be precise, if you use the Gmail SMTP server, the probability of your mail being marked as spam is least. Similarly, as Gmail is an efficient mail service, the emails sent by you can hardly get lost but reaches the inbox of your recipient successfully.

Moreover, using a Gmail SMTP server for sending WordPress emails increases the probability of successful mail delivery and minimizes the time delays. Also, you can send emails freely as there are no limits in the frequency of emails to be sent at a time.

How to Install and Configure Easy WP SMTP Plugin to Send Emails from Gmail SMTP

To send emails from your Gmail SMTP Server, you have to install and configure the Easy WP SMTP Plugin. This plugin is recommended because of its high efficiency in performance. Hence, if you are looking forward to executing this procedure, you need to implement the following steps.

First of all, you should download the Easy WP SMTP plugin from an authorized site like WordPress.org to your desktop. Then, upload the file to your WordPress site by digging into the admin panel. Once done, you should activate the plugin to make it work effectively.

The configuration procedure of this plugin can be broadly divided into two sections – configuration of general settings, as well as the testing and the debugging settings. To follow the procedure systematically, you should start with the general settings.

For this, you should dig into the Settings section of the activated plugin and find the General Settings option. Here, you can notice a number of fields, such as the From Email Address, From Name, SMTP Host and Type of Encryption. You need to fill up all the fields with relevant information.

To be precise, you should enter your email address in the From Email Address field. In our example, we enter the address of the Gmail account that we use for sending the emails. In the From Name field, you have to enter the name which can be displayed to your recipients as the sender’s name. The SMTP Host field should be filled up with “smtp.gmail.com” because you use a Gmail SMTP account for sending emails.

Apart from this, the type of encryption should be set to SSL, the SMTP Port must be 465 and the SMTP authentication should be marked as Yes. Once done, you can enter the username that you insert for logging into your mail server, and its password in the Username and Password fields respectively.

Upon the completion, you must hit the Save Changes option to save the configurations. Now, you can move to the second section of the configuration procedure; i.e. Testing and Debugging Settings.

As the name speaks, the Testing and Debugging Settings section allows you to check your configurations by sending a mail. Therefore, you should enter the email address of the recipient in the To field, followed by the subject of the mail (say, Test Mail) in the Subject field and the main text in the Message field. Once you insert the data appropriately, you should click on the Send Test Email to send mail through your Gmail SMTP server.

If the test mail reaches the inbox of the recipient, you have configured the plugin and your Gmail SMTP server successfully.