Why You Should Set Up SMTP for Your WordPress Website | EP 728

Why You Should Set Up SMTP for Your WordPress Website?

Read the full episode transcript below:

00:28 David Blackmon: Hey everybody, welcome to another episode of WP The Podcast, I’m David Blackmon

00:35 Tim Strifler: And i’m Tim Strifler

00:38 David Blackmon: Today we’re going to talk about why you should set up SMTP for your WordPress website. Before we dive into that, Tim why don’t you tell people what SMTP is?

00:50 Tim Strifler: Yeah SMTP is a basically a mail, email protocol. So i don’t know what the acronym stands for um it’s something very technical um i could look it up but i haven’t so uh basically in in terms of having a website..

03:51 David Blackmon: “Something mail transfer protocol” would be my guess, i don’t know what the “s” is, “something email’  that’s it, sorry..

01:14 Tim Strifler: Sexy?

01:15 David Blackmon: “sexy mail transfer protocol”  

01:18 Tim Strifler:  But basically what it does in terms of adding that to your website is rather than using the the web server. The WordPress mail, php mail to send uh emails from your site such as password resets if you have an online store email receipts, you know stuff like that. That your website needs to send those automated emails rather than using the web server. You can outsource it to another email server and so that’s what SMTP allows you to do. So that you can increase deliverability. Uh just the overall reliability of those emails coming through making, sure they don’t go to spam and then a lot of cases too. It adds you can have uh basically see everything that’s been sent and so it’s really really uh necessary if you have an online business, and making sure that those emails are coming through consistently, and you have a lot of users on the site. It’s very very important and so along with SMTP, there’s something similar but different such as a transactional email service. Sendgrid, Mandrel I think, Railgun uh is another one, um and uh yeah so those are similar and they basically provide the same solution outsourcing email to another server but they work differently Opposed to SMTP it’s usually just one email like you can set up a gmail account to send your emails through SMTP, and so um mail or… i’m sorry WP Forms has a plugin called WP SMTP i believe um and it’s perfect for like small sites and stuff like that. If you have a big online business i recommend using something like Sendgrid. You’re going to get even better uh better reliability and stuff like that so but yeah..

03:09 David Blackmon: Yeah WordPress is unfortunately as much, as we love WordPress it’s it’s email deliverability when you do it through the WordPress platform, just sucks so. So yeah set up an SMTP or use some type of transactional email service. Tomorrow we’ve got another great topic how to use Tie Tock to grow your business. Believe it or not, yeah it can happen. So tune in tomorrow to understand why. Until then we’ll see until tomorrow,  we’ll see you then Tim.

03:50 Tim Strifler: Take care, bye.