If the emails sent from your site are not received by all intended recipients, this guide will talk you through several options to help you improve email deliverability.
This feature is available on sites with the WordPress.com Creator and Entrepreneur plans, and the legacy Pro plan. For sites on the free, Starter, and Explorer plans, upgrade your plan to access this feature.
In this guide
By default, WordPress.com sites using plugins such as WooCommerce will send emails to your site’s users, but there are many possible reasons why emails sent from your site may not be received.
If your site is facing this issue, please try the following troubleshooting tips:
- To ensure email delivery, emails sent out by plugins on your site should be sent from email addresses that match the primary domain name of your site. For example, if your primary domain name is yourgroovydomain.com, you would want a plugin to send order notifications from an @yourgroovydomain.com email address, not a @gmail or @yahoo address. Check our Add Email to Your Domain guide for options.
- If a user of your site reports not receiving an email message, have them search through their spam/junk or other email folders as the first troubleshooting step — you’d be surprised how often emails are missed there.
- Check if it’s just one specific email address or a particular email provider not receiving messages. For example, some university email addresses heavily filter email messages received regardless of the sender.
- Check the documentation for the plugins you are using as they might have helpful troubleshooting steps you can follow. For example, WooCommerce has a guide with several settings to check.
- Install an email logging plugin, which can give you more information as to why emails may not be sent or delivered correctly.
If the troubleshooting advice in the previous section did not help, you can install an SMTP plugin to create a dedicated server to handle emails sent from your site.
Specific instructions are available depending on your email provider:
- Professional Email (Titan)
- Google Workspace (i.e., Gmail)
- Zoho Mail
