Are email notifications for affiliates and administrators not being sent? This can happen, but don’t worry just yet because emails can be set up to work nicely. Here’s how:
1. Check your email notifications settings
Before we deep dive into more technical aspects, let’s firstly make sure that your email settings are set up correctly.
To do this, navigate to your WordPress admin area > SliceWP > Settings > Email Notifications (tab) > General Settings (section).
Here, make sure that the From Email field is set to an email address that is registered to your domain name, instead of using a Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, etc. email address.
For example, let’s say that your website’s domain is awesomestore.com. The From Email address should be set to something like affiliates@awesomestore.com or hello@awesomestore.com.
Important note: The email address you set must be registered for your domain name in your hosting account. This is important as some hosts will prevent emails from being sent if the sender email address isn’t registered.
Now that you’ve properly set the sender email address, make sure that you’ve enabled the email notifications from WordPress admin area > SliceWP > Settings > Email Notifications (tab) > Email Notifications (section).
2. Install an SMTP plugin
SMTP stands for Simple Mail Transfer Protocol. Without going into the technical aspects of it, SMTP handles sending and receiving of email.
If you want to learn more about this subject, SendGrid’s article goes into much more detail.
In essence, by installing an SMTP plugin, you can send emails via an external SMTP server, instead of relying on your WordPress site. The main benefit to this is that STMP servers are far more reliable than WordPress’ mailing capabilities.
To configure an SMTP service to send WordPress emails, we recommend the Post SMTP plugin. This plugin is great because it provides a step-by-step walkthrough for configuring your email for SMTP.
Even so, for an extra, in-depth comparison of SMTP plugins, please check this article by MailPoet. Besides comparing plugins, they also go into more detail on the difficulties of sending emails from a WordPress site.