In WordPress, emails are important to ensure that you can communicate with your users. They are necessary to keep WordPress blogs running smoothly since users need them when performing actions such as activating a new WordPress blog and resetting their passwords. Emails also come in handy when you need to create a WordPress mailing list or notify your readers when you post. This means it can be frustrating and inconvenient, to say the least, when your site doesn’t want to send emails.
How Do I Fix This Error?
When I have a site that won’t send out emails, I follow these steps to troubleshoot it and ensure that everything starts running smoothly again:
Before we start, head over to WordPress settings and check if all the email settings there are configured correctly. Checking the settings first has saved me from an unnecessarily long debug process once or twice in the past. If you change anything, don’t forget to click on Save Changes when you’re done.
Your first step is to check what the problem is. You should use FTP to view your wp-config file directly. You’re going to need a text editor like Notepad++ and an FTP client. Another option would be Filezilla if you don’t want to download anything extra.
The next step is to turn on WordPress debug mode by adding this line of code in the wp-config file at the very bottom: define( ‘WP_DEBUG’, true );. The site should start logging errors now. You can view the logs in the debug.log file in the /wp-content/ folder.
Now that you know the error, you can pick the solution that correlates to the problem on your site. We’ll run through all these possibilities so that you can see how to get rid of the email problem on your site.
- If there’s an error message that concerns a plugin, you’ll need to assess if there are any plugins that may be interfering with your WordPress site. Download the plugin folder to your computer, then delete the copy on your site. Now, upload the plugins back one by one and test them until you find the one that was responsible for the error.
- Reset the cron job if it’s necessary: The cron job handles tasks that can be scheduled to run automatically at certain times on your site. To reset the cron job, you can just install the WP-Cron Cleaner plugin from the WordPress plugin library. There, you can see all the scheduled tasks and clear the ones that are orphaned or unnecessary.
- Ensure that you have the right type of hosting plan: Some hosting service providers offer plans with various tiers and bundled rewards for each tier. Get in contact with your hosting service provider and ask what plan you’re on and whether that plan has email support included. If you can afford it and need to, then ask about your upgrade options and if those have email services included. If you’re already on a plan that supports emails, speak to the representative and ask for guidance in fixing the issue.
- Ensure that the emails are not being blocked: On a shared hosting server, anti-spam software may be running on your site. This means that you’re going to need to contact the host and request assistance in ensuring that you don’t have this problem anymore. Ask if any of your site’s emails have been filtered and if it is possible to whitelist the site. On your own VPS or dedicated server, you’ll need to install an email plugin that can be used to send emails. You need this to send emails, and if you don’t already have one, it should resolve the error.
Conclusion
After running through these steps, you should have your site back up and running smoothly again. Emails are crucial in how a WordPress blog operates, so errors like this one shouldn’t be left unhandled without good reason.
