WP Engine is fantastic. Though a bit pricey, it is the premium hosting option for businesses who want their website hosted on a secure, available, scalable and a fast environment.
At Simpler Digital, we often have clients that host their sites on WP Engine.
There is only one problem. WP Engine does not do email delivery well. Many of their ‘email servers’ are blacklisted which leads to emails being generated on your website (contact form submissions, password reset emails etc.) going to your junk / spam folder.
WP Engine themselves acknowledge this and recommend that you use a specialist email service in conjunction with a SMTP plugin.
2 Options for Sending Email from WP Engine Hosted Website
Option 1 – use the email hosting associated with your domain.
Chances are if you have a business website, you have an email address setup (Gmail, Microsoft Exchange etc.). Meaning, you already have access to your mail server. Nothing beats sending email from your website using the actual email server for your domain.
All you need is to get your email host to send you the SMTP details.
SMTP Host: smtp.emailhostdomain.com
SMTP port: 465 for SSL. 25 or587 for Non SSL
Username: youemail@yourdomain.com
Password:
Option 2 – use the WP Engine equivalent for email sending – Mandrill.
Mandrill by MailChimp offers premium email services. Better yet, it is free to use up to 12,000 emails a month. For most small sites, this will be more than enough.
If you are only sending a few emails a month from your website (say under 500) and have access to your email SMTP server details, then you are better off using option 1. It does not require you to add SPF or DKIM records for full use. But if the SMTP details are too hard to get and you want a more scalable and reliable mechanism for delivering email from your WordPress website, Mandrill is the right choice.
How to Configure Your Email Server with WP Engine
Regardless of which option you choose above, the process for configuring both on your WordPress website is the same.
Install the WP Mail SMTP plugin. This is a very popular plugin that updates the wp_mail() function to use SMTP instead of mail().
After installing the plugin, navigate to Settings > Email in WP Admin. This will bring up a screen where you can enter your custom email SMTP details.
For Mandrill, you can complete it as such:
Once you have added those details, click Save Changes.
Now run a couple of test emails to ensure everything is working fine. But all in all, this should stop your website generated emails going to the junk folder.
