Enter your search term

Search by title or post keyword

WordPress Not Sending Emails: Simple Ways To Fix

Our website is supported by our users. We sometimes earn affiliate links when you click through the affiliate links on our website

Contact us for Questions

Emails are an important part of user communication.

You can’t get maximum ROI from your website traffic without building an email list of subscribers.

Therefore, you need to make sure that your WordPress website can send emails properly.

Sometimes, however, some issues can block your website from sending emails.

This may happen due to various reasons.

In this post, we shall try to take a look at those reasons, and introduce you to everything you need to know to fix the WordPress not sending emails issue.

Let’s start!

Frequently Asked Questions

Do I Need an SMTP Server to Send Emails With WordPress?

Yes — because an SMTP server is what routes your emails to their destination.

However, you don’t need to set it up manually on your premises — the hosting company that is hosting your website or a 3rd party mailer can do it for you.

Why Is My WordPress Contact Form Not Working?

Many reasons may be behind it.

The plugin you used to integrate your site with email marketing platforms may be broken, the email address supplied to receive the responses may be incorrect, or your SMTP server configuration may be incorrect.

What You’ll Need to Fix the WordPress Not Sending Emails Issue?

It doesn’t take much. You need just 3 things:

  • Your WordPress login credentials.
  • WP Mail SMTP plugin
  • Understanding of the underlying issue that’s affecting the delivery of your emails.

Why You’re Not Getting Emails from Your WordPress Site

WordPress not sending emails issue may be caused by several factors.

Here are some of the most common reasons that might cause your WordPress site to stop sending emails:

1. Emails Are Sent But Go to Spam

If you’re not getting emails from your WordPress website but you can see them in your WordPress admin panel, then it’s most likely that your emails are going to your recipient’s spam or junk folder.

This is a common problem with WordPress websites that host and send emails through their servers.

Follow the steps outlined below to figure out if that’s the issue causing your email delivery to falter:

Install the free Check Email plugin on your website. Navigate to Plugins >> Add New in your WordPress dashboard, and search for “Check Email”. Once you see the results, install and activate the plugin shown below.

Navigate to Tools >> Check Email.

Enter your email address in the “Send test email to” column and hit the “Send test email” button.

Check your inbox as well as your Spam folder for the test email.

pasted image 0 57

If you received the email in your Spam folder, then you need to ask your visitors to add your email address to their contact list.

Also, if they move the email from their Spam folder to their inbox, future emails sent by your website won’t land in the Spam/Junk folder.

But if your email didn’t arrive in the Spam folder too, then it means there’s some serious issue with your server.

Keep reading to find them and fix them.

2. Your Server is Failing Pre-Delivery Scanning

Another reason why your emails may not be getting delivered is the technology used by email service providers to protect their customers against phishing and spam emails.

Gmail and many other email service providers scan every email sent to your mailbox before delivering it to ensure that the email is actually coming from the same server it claims to be coming from.

And that’s where the issue arises — servers of many WordPress websites fail this test.

When this happens, the emails don’t get delivered even to the spam folder.

#. Your Server Isn’t Configured Correctly

Another reason that may affect the delivery of WordPress emails to your mailbox is incorrect server configuration.

This can happen if the SMTP settings on your server are incorrect, or if the PHP mail() function is not working properly.

The Solution: How to Fix WordPress Not Sending Emails Issue

Regardless of whichever issue is blocking your WordPress website from sending emails, there’s one solution that can fix it — changing your mail server.

Here are the steps you need to follow to do that:

Step 1. Install the WP Mail SMTP Plugin

pasted image 0 58
  1. Go to Plugins and click Add New.
  2. Search for “WP Mail SMTP” in the search bar at the top of your screen.
  3. Click “Install Now”, then click on “Activate”.

Step 2. Connect Your WordPress Website to a Mailer Service

Since WordPress emails are often blocked by Gmail and other email service providers for failing in pre-delivery scanning to validate their source, the solution is pretty simple: connect your website to a mailer service.

With this method, you’re not hosting your emails on your server, but rather on the server of a third-party mailer service.

This is how all well-established brands send their newsletters.

Some of the most popular mailer services include Mailgun, Sendgrid, Amazon SES, Microsoft 365/Outlook mailer, and Google/Gmail Mailer.

Selecting any of them as your mailer and connecting to WordPress is pretty straightforward with the WP Mail SMTP plugin’s Setup Wizard.

The wizard launches automatically after you activate the plugin.

You just need to click the “Let’s Get Started” button.

pasted image 0 59

The next screen will show you a list of available mailers that you can connect to your WordPress website.

pasted image 0 61

Once you have selected the mailer of your choice, open the relevant documentation for further steps from the links given below:

Once you complete the steps from any of the documentation listed above, your website will be connected to the mailer service that you selected.  

Step 3. Time to Test

By now your issue of WordPress not sending emails should be fixed.

You can check it by sending a test mail, just as you sent in the first step of this tutorial.

Check it, and leave all other settings (i.e. Email deliverability, error tracking, etc.) enabled because all those settings help in improving the deliverability of your WordPress emails.  

Similar Tutorials to Check Out

Wrapping Up

Before you can start a drip email campaign, weekly newsletter, or any other kind of email marketing campaign, it’s important to ensure that all your emails are sent and delivered.

And as you can see, there are multiple reasons why your WordPress website may not be sending emails.

Thankfully, you can fix all of them with a single change to your SMTP server.

We hope we explained the full procedure of identifying and properly fixing this issue.

If you still have any questions, feel free to leave them in the comments and we shall try to answer them.

Also, share this tutorial on your social media profile, so others can also learn how to fix this issue on their websites.

Leave a Comment