There is one potential issue you might run into with any form plugin. And that’s email deliverability. What this means is that your form plugin tries to send an email, and for whatever reason, it doesn’t go through.
“That can be a big problem if you have email notification set up and you never get notified. The reason this happens is that many web servers are designed to send files, like HTML files. They aren’t designed to be email servers. When regular web servers send emails, they are sometimes lost, and sometimes, they’re marked as spam”, told us James, from a famous web design tutorials site.
So every site should send reliable emails. And that’s why you should use an SMTP service. This is the service that will send emails for you.And for most businesses, you need to send so few that you don’t have to pay anything. So before we install any contact forms, you want to install an SMTP plugin, so that emails send correctly.
The nice thing is that no matter what form plugin we use, the SMTP plugin should work correctly. There are a couple of options here.
Mailgun is the option I use on my personal sites. It’s free, up to 10,000 emails per month. Pretty great, right? SendGrid is another option. I’ve used them before, although at the moment, it doesn’t seem like they have a free plan.
And then WP Mail SMTP is a plugin that connects your site to an email account, and the email is sent through that account. That’s useful if you use Google Apps and have an account for infoatyourbusiness.com, or something that like that, that sends out all of those notifications.
Since my site’s notifications are mostly for me, I won’t be using an extra email account just for notifications. I’ll be using Mailgun. However, if you want to go the extra mile and set up a special email account just for notifications, you can follow this tutorial. I’m already logged into my WordPress site.
We’ll be using KinetEco for this course. So let’s go ahead and go into the Dashboard. We’re going to go to Plugins, Add New, and we’re going to type in mailgun.
There it is, By Mailgun. We’ll click Install Now and Activate. Now, of course, we have to configure Mailgun, so let’s click this link up here. Let’s go ahead and go to our Mailgun account, so we can enter the domain name and the API key. We’ll start with the domain name. We’ll click on Domains up here.
And you should see one already. If you don’t, you can create a new one. I’ll copy this, go back to the site, paste that in,and then let’s go up to my account and then click Account Settings.
And then under API Keys, we’ll click that little button, so we can see it. We’ll copy it and we’ll go back to our site and paste that in. And now let’s go ahead, scroll down, click Save Changes, and then Test Configuration.
And that means it’s working. And we can also see this under Logs. So we should see a test right there. These logs are also incredibly handy to look through in case you think something is getting stuckin a spam filter.
You can see right here if it was actually sent. If you see your email here, then you’re good to go. Your mail is being routed through an email service, which is so much more reliable than a web server. If you don’t see your email here or if you got an error when you press the Test Configuration button, you may need to add an authorized recipient to your domain in Mailgun.
Once you get all of that set up, there should be nothing stopping you from getting a ton of interest in your product and receiving all of the notifications.
