Emails are a very important part of a website, when an email is sent from your WordPress website or your store you want to reach the other side.

Usually, the cPanel email accounts are not that reliable as a business solution and that’s why you may want to use a dedicated email sender like Gmail.

You can use the free version of Gmail to send emails from your WordPress, although the free version has some limitations you will be sure that emails are reaching the inbox. If you sell services, you have a membership website or an e-commerce one is important that notifications are reaching the user’s inbox. Someone may order something or have their password reset and without a good email solution the details will not reach his inbox

Gmail SMTP Limitations

• 500 emails per day for a Free Gmail account (a little over 15k emails per month)
• 1,000 emails per day if you’re paying for G Suite (just shy of 30k emails per month)

I have another article with a video that can help you setup Zoho SMTP in WordPress in case you are interested you can check that article.

How to Send WordPress Emails Using Gmail SMTP Server

In the next part, we will see all the steps you need to do on your WordPress website to have Gmail SMTP used to send emails. There are 2 ways to do this one is simpler and other is more complex and requires more configurations to be done in Google console. The plugin we are going to use is offering the both options and if you are interested in the advanced way with API access you should check their doc.

In this article we will focus to do the easy part where we just need to use the SMTP details to configure WordPress to send emails.

In case you want to check the step by step video with all the setting you should see the bellow one:

1.Install FluentSMTP

FluentSMTP is the best plugin that you can use to send email via your WordPress website. It is free and the features that it comes with you need to pay in other plugins. Just go to Plugins – Add New and search for FluentSMTP, you install it and activate it.

2. Get You Credentials from Google

You need to link your Gmail account with FluentSMTP to do that you need to go and create a password for your app. Most of the accounts have 2FA set up so you need this password to connect your website to gmail.

To do this you need to create a app password by following Google doc. What you need to to is go to google accounts and under Security – Signing in to Google – App Passwords you go and create one.

Under Select App – you choose Other and give it a name and hit generate. A password will be provided for you at next windows.

3. Setup FluentSMTP

Next with the password you need to go and setup FluentSMTP config area. Choose other SMTP option. There you should input the following values:

• From Email: Your email address that you want to see in FROM
• From Name: Name in From
• SMTP Host: smtp.gmail.com
• SMTP port (TLS): 587
• Encryption: TLS
• Requires TLS: No
• Requires authentication / Use authentication: Yes
• SMTP username: Your full Gmail address (e.g. [email protected])
• SMTP password: The password that you use to log in to Gmail or your credetian set at step 2

After just save the connection setting and you are set to go. The from address will not reflect fully as this is a free gmail account and in the email header you will see the Google account. But if someone want’s to replay to you address will use the address you set up there.

4. Test Email Settings

The last step is to test and see if our email is working, in Email Test just go and send a test email to your email address to see if the email is sent. You can let the from as it is (blank) and only input the address you want. If the email is sent successful and you don’t get any error you successfully set Gmail in your WordPress installation.

Conclusions

That’s the easy way that you can use to configure Gmail SMTP into your WordPress to send emails with it. Just remember that this is not for a high number of emails but should be enough for most.