If you took a moment about this, you would realize how important the ability to send email really is for a website. Need proof? Check your inbox. How many emails are in it from people and how many from various websites? Exactly.
The problem with WordPress and email is that it is notoriously unreliable. In some cases, an unsent email means a lost customer. Or it could be an audience member who will never return to the website.
It doesn’t have to be that dramatic – email misfires can cause extra work for your website’s support staff. However, we will talk a little bit about the WordPress SMTP service, which is a common way to deal with the problem, as it would be best if these things were not at all and everything was fine.
In this article, you will read:
An SMTP service provider is a company that provides you – your website – with the service of sending emails using SMTP. SMTP is short for Simple Mail Transfer Protocol, which is unsurprisingly a protocol for sending email.
SMTP is pretty important because it’s the industry standard for sending email. It also uses something called proper authentication which can improve the deliverability of your emails. Also, since you are using a service provider for an email service, you can expect them to be better at handling email than an entity whose main job is to host your website.
Generally, websites use an SMTP service provider because they want to make their emails more likely to be delivered. The more emails your website sends and the more important it is to their operation and your business model, the more you will want to start using an SMTP service provider.
Why? Because your WordPress server probably didn’t properly configure WordPress’ PHP mail functionality. Problems with WordPress not sending emails are very common. So all those emails your website sends when events like password changes trigger them may never reach their destination. And that could be bad.
Of course, you can choose a host that offers SMTP services. But that doesn’t change how good an idea it is to have a service dedicated solely to sending your website emails. And it wouldn’t hurt to be able to use some of these services for free, at least until it’s time to expand your emailing capabilities.
Now that we know what an SMTP service is and why your website might need one, let’s show you a few popular options.
Having a nice client list and a free beginner plan, SendGrid It is one of the most used solutions on the market. It is a cloud-based service that you can use for SMTP service but also to run email marketing campaigns.
With SendGrid you will have everything you expect from an SMTP service provider. There are ways to improve deliverability, you’ll have access to analytics, email testing, and you’ll have scalability options.
As for the price – you can start for free and upgrade the paid plans as you exceed the free plan. Paid plans start at $14.95 per month and go up from there.
you just have to choose mail gun If you are a developer looking for a service provider to describe with the word “strong”. If this is your jam, you should look no further. But if you are a beginner, you may want to continue.
If you choose Mailgun, you’ll have the industry standard setting email API solution for developers. It goes without saying that you’ll get analytics, performance tweaks, and incoming email handling options.
You can get some of this for free for three months. Then you can pay as you grow. You can also upgrade to one of the paid plans starting at $35 per month.
sendinblue It is one of the best service providers on the market. They will check if you are in the market to find more than just an SMTP service provider as SMTP or transactional email as they say, it is only a small part of their full offer.
But that little bit can give you what your website needs for transactional emails. Ultimately, Sendinblue’s service offers everything you would expect from a premium provider – great email templates, high deliverability and performance monitoring options.
The basic Sendinblue service is free, but limited to sending only 300 emails per day. To remove the daily limit, you must subscribe to one of their plans, which starts at $25 per month.
mandrill It is the name of Mailchimp’s transactional email plugin. A great solution for websites that already use Mailchimp. If you don’t use Mailchimp, Mandrill is not an option for you.
Mandrill offers features like automatic feedback loop recording, great analytics and A/B testing with benchmark reports, tons of options for email customization and fast delivery time. The email is the subject of Mailchimp and is also showing up in the transactional email service.
Your form of payment for Mandrill is 25,000 email blocks costing $20 each. You can also try it for free, but it is a paid service.
Need to focus on deliverability to Gmail users? why don’t you try G Suite? Google offers a free SMTP service to anyone with an email, but you might want to consider signing up for at least the Basic G Suite plan for business purposes.
With G Suite, you get all the benefits of a productivity suite along with an SMTP service. Here’s Meet video and audio conferencing, shared calendars, form builder, and more.
The best part is that you get it for as little as $6 per user per month. This is great for a small business and also leaves you with the option to opt for more expensive and inclusive plans as your needs grow.
Solution
When communication is key to your business, you want to do everything you can to ensure the message reaches its intended recipient. With WordPress and email, this usually means getting an SMTP service provider to handle transactional emails rather than your hosting provider. This is a much more reliable option and one that you can usually try for free.
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