Ensure your WordPress emails are sent and track email open rates

WP SMTP is really a must have plugin for any WordPress site. This is basically because without it, any notifications sent through the site will likely be routed to the spam or junk folder on your WordPress site.

Any new WordPress instance requires configurations, such as setting up SSL to serve traffic over https, enable a caching plugin like WP Super Cache, a powerful form builder plugin like WPForms or Gravity Forms, and WP SMTP to allow for easy configuration of transactional email notifications.

The WP SMTP plugin is often overlooked, this is because it is practically invisible to the untrained eye. Without any of the other essential WordPress plugins mentioned above, you are usually met with with a warning or indication that something is missing. For example, without an SSL certificate installed, a visitor to the website is met with a security warning. No caching plugin is usually indicated with slower than usual speed when loading your website pages. No forms plugin installed, well you just can’t build contact forms. If you aren’t sending through SMTP then you might not even realize.

The default mechanism for sending notifications on a WordPress site is through PHP. This basically just send the messages unauthenticated through your web server. The same practice is often adopted by scammer and spammers. This is the main reason why email notifications sent this way usually end up the spam or junk mail folders of your mailbox.

The WP SMTP plugin allows you to authenticate a mailbox with various email providers such as Amazon SES, Zoho Mail, GroupList, or other transactional email services. This could be configured to be a subdomain of your root domain name.

some examples here could be…

e.domain.com
email.domain.com
notifications.domain.com

It is best practice not to configure transactional email on your root domain since this is usually used for day-to-day emailing. Email on a domain you manage can also have the DNS configured to ensure mail sent from your domain is better trusted among email service providers. These records include DKIM and SPF and will help keep your email notifications out of the junk folders of any recipients.

Once you have WP SMTP installed and configured, you are ready to sending transactional email on your WordPress site. These email notifications could include password reset emails, important site administration notifications, contact form notifications, etc.

These notifications are often an important function of the website. Another great feature of the premium version of WP SMTP is the ability to track opens of transactional email notifications and ensure that your notifications are being sent, delivered, and received.

Over looking this essential part of running a WordPress site could see you missing contact form notifications, customer quotes requests and other essential communication to running your business.