All of a sudden your not receiving email notifications from your WordPress website. What this means is, when a user fills in a form from your site you aren’t receiving any notification. This is a major issue as, how will you know when someone has contacted you? You may miss out on potential clients.
In this tutorial, I will explain how to fix this issue by installing a WordPress SMTP plugin and get your email notifications working again! This issue is quite common and can happen out of the blue with no explanation.
It can happen with any of these plugins – Contact Form 7, Ninja Forms, or any form you have installed in your site.
Let’s get started
The first thing you need to do is log in to your hosting and get your email server settings for the email that receives the notifications. This is a crucial step, without these settings we can’t fix the problem. The mail server settings will look something similar to the image below.
(A note for spammers, this is a dummy email).
If for some reason you can’t find these settings, contact your host and ask them to send to you. You MUST however, know the password to your email that receives the notifications. This is something that they won’t necessarily have or give to you. They might suggest resetting the password. Which is not ideal as you would then need to update the password on all your devices that have that email.
The next step
We need to install what they call an SMTP plugin. There are many of these types of plugins. The best SMTP WordPress plugin I have found is called WP Mail SMTP.
- So let’s install it.
- Login to your wp-admin.
- Go to Plugins.
- Click > Add New
- Search for the plugin.
- “WP Mail SMTP” by WPForms.
- Click Install and Activate.
- Navigate to the WP Mail SMTP panel
- Then Settings.
The settings for the plugin
Now we need to add the correct information to the settings. Otherwise, it won’t work.
- Go to the > From Email field.
- Add your email address.
- The email you wish to receive notifications to.
- I always check > Force From Email
- Go to the > Name field.
- Add your business name.
- See the image below.
Next step
- Make sure you check the box for the > Return Path field.
- Go to Mailer.
- Check > Other SMTP.
- See the image below.
Next…
- In the SMTP Host field > add your hostname.
- This you must get from the host as discussed from above.
- Go to Encryption > Check SSL
- The SMTP Port – should be 465 by default.
- If this doesn’t work you may have to add a different port number based on what your server settings. Ask your host.
- Turn the Auto TLS to OFF.
- See the image below.
Lastly
- Go to > Authentication – and turn this on.
- In the SMTP Username field > add your email.
- Add your email password to the > SMTP Password.
- Save Settings
- See the image below.
Now to test
So now that you have set up the plugin. You need to test to see if it works. Go to your form and add the information and send.
Fingers crossed it works for you! If it doesn’t contact our host and double-check all the settings in the plugin and your email password. As usually, errors in these settings will cause issues.
To sum up
If you’re not receiving email notifications from your website form anymore it is usually an issue with your site. The best way to fix this is by adding an SMTP plugin. Follow our tutorial above and this should fix it!
If you need help setting up the SMTP plugin for WordPress visit our WordPress support page and we can do this for a small fee.
Written by Jodi Allbon 2019.
