How to Send Email in WordPress using the Gmail SMTP Server

Key Takeaways

are you looking for a reliable way to send emails from your WordPress website we'll keep watching because in this video you'll learn how to send email in WordPress using the Gmail SMTP server SMTP or Simple Mail Transfer Protocol is the industry standard for sending emails and since it uses proper authentication it increases your email deliverability basically using Gmail SMTP server keeps your emails from going to spam to use the Gmail SMTP server you can either use it with your free gmail account like say Jane Smith @ gmail.com or you can use the G Sweet paid plan where you get your own email address with your domain name like say Jane Smith at my site com you'll want to decide which way you want to go but everything else in this tutorial will be the same whether you have the free or the paid so if you're ready let's get started to get things set up on your website we'll be installing a plug-in called WP male SMTP plugin to do that let's head over to our wordpress dashboard we'll go down to plugins area add new in the search box let's type in WP email SMTP this is the one we want buy WP forms so let's click install now once you install it you'll also want to make sure you activate it once it's activated you can see settings down here or if you ever need to go to it afterwards you can go to settings WP mail SMTP here now we need to set it up in the from email add the email address that is set up with your gmail account you also want to put in your from under mailer since we're using Gmail let's select the gmail account hit the set the return path to match the from email and now let's scroll down because we need to fill out this information here to get the client ID and client secret we need to create a project in the Google developers console area so we'll open up a new tab if you haven't created any projects then you'll have a button here to say create project otherwise you can go up here and click the plus button to create a new project and click create now we need to enable the API and services so let's scroll down we're looking for the enable API and credentials from here we need to find the one that we're looking for you want to enable the Gmail API so let's enable that here and click enable next we need to create credentials for this so click on the button for create credentials from here you want to make sure web browser and JavaScript is selected and then where what data will be accessing you need to select user data then we need to do what credentials do I need let's give this a name under authorize JavaScript origins enter your web address here and for this authorized redirect URIs we need to go back over to our WordPress dashboard and copy this information go back over right click in the authorized redirect and paste now that we've done all that let's click create client ID now to setup the OAuth consent screen you need to add the email address that will be used and add the product name that will be shown to users this is usually just you so alright once we're done with that let's click continue from here we can copy our client ID so we'll copy that head back over to our dashboard here we can paste that and we're good but we still need the client secret so let's head back over and we'll say done from here we can come over here and click the edit button and then I'll bring up our client ID in our client secret from here we can get our client secret make sure that you only copy the data and not any accidental extra spaces so once you copy that head back over to client secret and paste that in there now we can save our set and now when we scroll down we can say allow the plugin to send emails using your Google account so once I click that you'll see the screen to authorize the website to use your email address let's allow that once you've done that you'll see a success notification saying that the API project is now connected to our website and now you're all set up you can even send an email test to make sure everything works correctly now there's a second method that you can use and that setting up the Gmail SMTP as the SMTP sender this will allow you to manually connect your Gmail's SMTP servers to send for your WordPress emails it is not as secure as the OAuth so we definitely recommend the OAuth but it's a way that you can get through it if you need to to do that let's head back over to our settings area and make sure you enter your email and your from name correctly and instead of using the Google will do other smtp we'll scroll down to our SMTP information and you'll need to fill out this information from Google for the SMTP host you need to setup smtp.gmail.com use the port 465 we want encryption keep this on by default for authentication let's turn that on and from here you'll need to add your username and password this is your Gmail or your or this could be your G sweet personalized domain name as well setup the password that you use for your email account and save settings now no matter which version you use you can always do a test email so we'll do a test email to make sure that there was no problem can you see once you send a test email you'll get a notification that it was sent successfully did you learn something from today's video if so subscribe to our YouTube channel and we'll send more helpful tips to help you manage your WordPress website and thanks for watching