Enabling SMTP on your WordPress Site
On your WordPress site, ensuring reliable and efficient delivery of emails is crucial. Whether it’s for sending out newsletters, order confirmations, or user notifications, having a robust email delivery system is essential.
For photography sites, making sure that your contact form submissions are delivered properly is probably your number one goal.
What is SMTP
Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) stands as the industry standard for sending emails reliably. An SMTP server is an application or computer that sends, receives and relays email. Cloudways disables the older PHP mail solution that many WordPress sites have used previously, due to security risks and deliverability issues.
If you don’t enable SMTP, your website will not send any emails (contact form, new user, password reset, etc).
This article delves into the seamless integration of SMTP into your WordPress site hosted on Cloudways, utilizing the Fluent SMTP plugin and the Elastic Email service (Cloudways Add-on).
We’ll guide you through the step-by-step process of enhancing your site’s email deliverability, ensuring that your communications reach their intended recipients without a hitch.
Enable The Elastic Email Add-on
This is quite easy, you first need to go to your Add-ons section in Cloudways. Here you can enable Elastic email and select 1,000 emails per month.


Next, We need to verify your Domain
This step required making a handful of DNS records. You do this wherever you registered your domain, or on a service like Cloudflare if you have that installed. Here are the full instructions, with examples, for this step: https://support.cloudways.com/en/articles/5130879-how-to-activate-the-elastic-email-add-on#h_0802103865
You’ll need to make the following records: SPF, DKIM, Tracking, MX (any), and DMARC. Pay close attention if you have already verified your domain for a custom email address, you’ll need to add the records for Elastic Email without erasing any existing records.


Install The Fluent SMTP Plugin
Search the plugin repository for FluentSMTP, install, and activate.

From here, you need to fill in your name and email address. This can’t be a “gmail” or similar email. It must be from your domain. If you don’t plan on using this email, just use “noreply@yourdomain.com”. This will ensure that people don’t try sending it emails.

Then, copy the API key from Cloudways into this box and keep the type set to “transactional”.

Testing Your Email
Use the built in testing tool to make sure that your website can send emails.


Email Logs
FluentSMTP keeps a log of your emails and shows any undeliverable messages or errors.


That’s it!
You should now have both reliable email from your website (contact forms, password resets, etc) and a log of all emails sent from your site. No more anxiety that the form isn’t submitting properly and that you’re missing emails in your inbox!
If you have any questions, feel free to post in the Facebook Group or send us an email.