Certified WordPress Developer and SEO Specialist with 10+ years of experience on Fiverr. I provide expert solutions for WordPress error fixing, debugging, speed optimization, and security hardening. Services include hacked site recovery, malware removal, on-page SEO optimization, and full customization to ensure your website runs fast, secure, and ranks higher on Google.
Do you want to test whether your WordPress website is successfully sending email?
WordPress sends emails to you and your site users for many different reasons, from passwords reset emails to purchase receipts. That’s why it’s so important to test whether your website is sending email reliably.
In this article, we’ll show you how to send a test email from WordPress to make sure there are no problems with your email configuration.
Why Test That Your WordPress Email Is Working Reliably?
All too often we hear that users have trouble with WordPress not sending emails. That’s a problem because you rely on email to keep your website running smoothly.
For example, your site sends emails to welcome new users, reset lost passwords, send order forms, and notify you when a new user registers or someone fills in your contact form.
When you first set up your WordPress website or SMTP service, it’s smart to confirm that your website’s email is working correctly by sending a test email.
With that being said, let’s look at how to send a test email from WordPress.
After that, you will need to configure the plugin to work with your SMTP mailing service. The WP Mail SMTP wizard will take you through the process step by step, or you can follow our guides on how to set up WP Mail SMTP with Sendinblue, Gmail, Microsoft Outlook, Amazon SES, or your web host.
Once you have finished setting up WP Mail SMTP, you can send a test email to make sure it is configured correctly.
To do that, you need to head over to WP Mail SMTP » Tools in your admin menu, where you’ll see the ‘Email Test’ page. By default, the test email will be sent to your site’s admin email address, but you can change this by typing a different email address into the ‘Send To’ field.
We recommend you keep the ‘HTML’ setting in the ‘On’ position, but if you want to send a plain text email, then you can switch it off.
Once you’re happy with the settings, simply click the ‘Send Email’ button, and a test email will be sent to the address you entered.
Viewing the Email Test Results
After WP Mail SMTP attempts to send the test email, it will give you immediate feedback on whether the test was successful or not.
If your WordPress email was set up correctly, then the test email was sent without any problems. You will see a ‘Success!’ notification displayed on the screen.
Now you’ll want to check and see if the test email actually did arrive at the email address it was sent to.
You should find an email like the one below in your inbox. If you do, congratulations! Email is working properly on your WordPress site.
However, if there are problems with your email configuration, then the test email will not be able to be sent at all.
You’ll be shown a message that describes the error or problem, along with some steps you can take to resolve it.
After following the steps to fix the issues, you should send another test email to confirm that your WordPress email is now working.
If the Domain Settings Need to Be Changed
Even if the test email was successful, you may have received a notification listing some issues. That’s because the test checks that your ‘from’ address’s domain is configured correctly in your DNS records.
This can improve the deliverability of your email, so that it doesn’t get blocked or sent to the spam folder.
The notification will list and explain any issues, and provide links to step by step guides that will help you configure your DNS records correctly.
Once you’ve finished fixing the issues, you should send another test email to make sure that everything is working properly now.
If You Need Professional Help
Many beginners find that configuring their WordPress email is tricky. Luckily, if you can’t get WordPress email working on your own, then you can ask an expert to set it up for you.
The good news is that a WP Mail SMTP Elite license includes White Glove Setup. This means that someone from their expert team will configure your email settings for you.
Recently one of our readers asked us to share some WordPress market share data, usage stats, and research to help convince their boss on why they should use WordPress.
Even though WordPress is the most popular website builder in the world, sometimes popularity alone is not enough for users to make up their mind.
In this article, we have compiled an ultimate list of WordPress usage stats, market share research, and other data that will help you convince others to start using WordPress.
It’s important not to confuse WordPress (the software) with WordPress.com which is a hosted solution. To learn more, see the difference between WordPress.com vs WordPress.org in our side-by-side comparison.
It all started when two users of a blogging software called b2/cafelog decided to take the software in a new direction. The idea was coined by Matt Mullenweg who was then joined by Mark Little and together they released the first version of WordPress on May 27, 2003.
WordPress is a community software and thousands of users from all over the world have contributed to it by submitting code, fixing bugs, translating, testing, and helping others use it.
Let’s take a look at some WordPress stats and facts to see how WordPress is helping people do great things on the internet.
How Popular is WordPress?
WordPress is immensely popular and is used by millions of people all over the world. Here are some numbers to put things in perspective.
WordPress powers more than 43% of all websites on the internet.
WordPress powers websites for big name brands including Disney, Sony, Facebook, and more.
38% of top 10,000 Websites are powered by WordPress.
More than 22% of all new domain names in the United States are running WordPress.
Each day more than 1000 new WordPress sites join the top 10 million websites tracked by W3Techs.com.
While these are impressive stats, the only way to truly understand the popularity of WordPress is to look at it relative to other popular content management systems.
For example Shopify is the second popular, but it’s only 1/10th the size of WordPress since it powers about 4.4% of all sites vs WordPress 43.2%.
Wix spends tens of millions in marketing, but it only powers 1.9% of all websites. Meaning WordPress is 22x more popular than Wix.
Other popular CMS all have under 2% market share each such as Squarespace (1.8%), Joomla (1.7%), Drupal (1.3%), Blogger (1%), and Magento at just 0.6%.
When it comes to popularity, there’s no comparison to WordPress. According to the usage statistics, WordPress market share is 3x larger than the usage of other 9 popular website builders and blogging platforms combined.
WordPress Plugins
The biggest reason behind WordPress’ popularity is its large plugin & extensions ecosystem.
Plugins are like apps for your WordPress website. You can install them to add new features to your site and extend its functionality. To learn more, see our guide on what are WordPress plugins and how do they work?.
Here are some mind-blowing facts about WordPress plugins, which show just how massive the WordPress ecosystem is.
There are more than 59,000 free WordPress plugins on WordPress.org plugin directory alone.
9 of those plugins are installed on 5 million+ websites.
The most popular eCommerce plugin, WooCommerce is installed on more than 5 million websites as per the WordPress plugin directory since it shows all count above that as 5 million +. According to W3Techs, WooCommerce market share is 8.8% of all websites making it more popular than Shopify for online stores and eCommerce sites.
The popular WordPress form plugin, WPForms, is also installed on more than 5 million websites. According to Builtwith, it’s used by over 1.6% of the top 1 million websites. It’s the fastest growing form builder on the entire internet.
Our plugins stats are from the official WordPress.org plugin directory alone. Many plugin developers sell premium versions of their plugins from their own websites.
With a healthy plugins ecosystem, it means that you can add custom functionality to your website at a fraction of the cost of custom development.
Themes control the appearance of a WordPress website. These are WordPress specific website design templates that you can install on your website to change its look.
There are thousands of free and paid WordPress themes available offering WordPress users an endless combination of design, layout, color schemes, and features.
Themes were first introduced with WordPress 1.5 back in 2005, with the first new default WordPress theme called Kubrick
Just like plugins, there are both free and paid WordPress themes that you can install.
WordPress.org’s free theme directory has more than 9,100 free WordPress themes.
According to Builtwith, Divi by Elegant Themes is the most popular theme used by 6% of websites analyzed by their service.
WordPress is a self-hosted website building software. In other words, you need to have a web hosting provider to create a website with WordPress.
Due to it’s popularity, many hosting companies have added specialized WordPress hosting services to make it easier for small business owners to get started with WordPress.
SiteGround (2.0%) – a premium WordPress hosting company that users love because of their top notch support. We use SiteGround to host WPBeginner site.
Hostinger (1.2%) – an affordable WordPress hosting company that’s growing in international markets due to it’s cheap web hosting prices.
The data above is from W3Techs report and excludes other platforms like Amazon (AWS), Google Cloud, NameCheap, Automattic, and others. Our list above is representative of the reader polls on WPBeginner for popular web hosting.
WordPress Security
WordPress is the most commonly used CMS software in the world, which also makes it a common target of hacking attempts, DDOS attacks, malware, and trojans.
According to Sucuri, a leading website security company, 83% of all CMS based websites that were hacked in 2017 were running WordPress. This number isn’t surprising considering that WordPress holds 65% of CMS market share.
Nearly 50% WordPress sites are affected by a security vulnerability caused by an outdated or poorly coded WordPress plugin or theme
Around 8% of WordPress sites were hacked due to a weak password.
You can make your WordPress site as secure as possible by following some basic security best practices. To learn more, see our complete WordPress security guide for step by step instructions.
Often the stats above cause WordPress to get a bad reputation, but the reality is that WordPress itself is not insecure. WordPress core goes through rigorous security audits, and it’s more secure than many other platforms out there.
The only fault WordPress has is that it’s popular which leads to stats like above.
WordPress Community
WordPress has a massive user base spread across all over the world. It is used by not just businesses, but also governments, schools and colleges, non-profits, and more.
As an open source project, WordPress is driven by a global community of users. This means that anyone can contribute to the project in many different ways.
WordPress translation community has it fully translated into 56 languages, partially translated in dozens more.
In 2017, WordPress communities around the world organized 128 WordCamp events, in 48 countries, and sold 39,625 tickets.
In 2017, Local WordPress communities organized 4,379 meetups in 73 countries
There are dozens of WordPress groups on Facebook, with WPBeginner Engage being the largest WordPress Facebook group with over 81,500 members.
WordPress has a thriving multi-billion dollar ecosystem that creates thousands of jobs all over the world. This also includes freelancers, developers, and companies that sell WordPress related products and services.
At the time of writing this article, freelancer.com website alone had 680,743 WordPress jobs posted out of these 700 were open.
Thousands of WordPress jobs are currently open on many popular freelancing websites. You can always visit our Careers page to find WordPress jobs.
Average hourly rate for WordPress developers can be anywhere between $20-$100 per hour depending on their expertise and job at hand.
A custom WordPress theme with its own unique design and plugins can cost $10,000 and it may increase depending on project’s requirements.
We hope this article helped you discover some new WordPress stats, facts, and interesting research. You may also want to see our article on the best domain registrar and best business phone services for small business.
If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.
Are you a photographer using WordPress and wondering what are some of the best WordPress plugins for photographers?
WordPress plugins help you improve your workflow, automate different tasks, optimize your website for search engines, and provide a better user experience to your visitors.
In this article, we will show you the best WordPress plugins for photographers.
Why Use a WordPress Photography Plugin?
Thousands of photographers use WordPress to share their work with the world. That’s because WordPress is the easiest way to build a photography website.
With the right photography theme, you can create a completely unique look for your website. However, the real power of WordPress comes from plugins that allow you to add new features and automate multiple tasks to improve your workflows.
For instance, you can use an SEO plugin to optimize your images and website for search engines and improve your keyword rankings. Similarly, there are plugins for displaying your photographs in galleries and image sliders, making them elegant and prominent on your site.
Aside from that, you’d also want to promote your work and get traffic more traffic to your website. This is where you can use social media WordPress plugins to grow your followers.
That said, let’s look at some of the best WordPress plugins for photographers.
Smash Balloon is the best social media WordPress plugin. It’s an extremely useful plugin for photographers because it helps you display photos, videos, and other content from social media platforms on your WordPress website.
You can create a custom Twitter feed, Facebook feed, YouTube feed, and Instagram feed using Smash Balloon. It also helps create a social wall, where you can combine content from multiple social channels and show them in a single feed.
This can save you a lot of time, since any photos you post on your social media accounts will automatically be added to your professional website, too.
The plugin is very easy to use and offers lots of design options, so you can customize your social feeds to match your brand. Smash Balloon is SEO-friendly and helps leverage social proof to boost engagement, increase followers, and grow your business.
Image galleries created with Envira Gallery load much faster, which makes it super fun and easy for your users to browse the galleries. You can also enable watermarks to prevent image theft.
Envira Gallery is also the most search engine-friendly gallery plugin. It allows you to add metadata for your images and galleries easily. It works great with other SEO plugins as well.
Soliloquy is the best WordPress slider plugin. It allows you to quickly and easily create fully responsive slideshows within minutes. You can add those sliders to any page, post, or even your homepage.
It’s a great plugin to showcase your photographs on your WordPress website. Users can easily browse through different pictures using the slider.
Soliloquy is highly optimized for speed, which means your pages will load faster. Visual effects, customizations, and SEO-friendly slides are just some of the features of this easy-to-use tool.
As a photographer, you can save time by automating repetitive tasks like processing data from contact forms, offering support, sharing your pictures on social media, and more.
With Uncanny Automator, you can use existing plugins and software to talk to each other. It supports over 70 of the most popular WordPress plugins and offers over 700 triggers and actions.
WPForms is the most beginner-friendly contact form plugin for WordPress. It helps your clients to stay in touch with you by using a contact form. You can also accept quotations and proposals for new projects using WPForms.
Its drag and drop online form builder allows you to easily create contact forms, email subscription forms, order forms, payment forms, and other types of online forms with just a few clicks.
WPForms comes with pre-built templates, spam protection, and each form is responsive for any device. It also lets you collect files and documents through form submissions and accept online payments.
The plugin is compatible with other popular WordPress plugins, email marketing services, and payment providers.
For photographers, WordPress SEO allows you to optimize your pages and use open graph metadata. Open Graph is used by Facebook and many other social websites to display your pages properly when shared.
It also includes image SEO options so you can optimize your photographs to appear more often in search results and get more traffic to your website.
It allows users to place their booking on your website and even pay for it using PayPal. For professional photographers, this enables you to get more paid work.
The plugin easily syncs with your calendar and you can set email notifications and reminders when an appointment is booked, rescheduled, or canceled. Other than that, you can also create your own booking form using BirchPress.
The plugin offers ready-to-use website templates for your photography portfolio. Simply add the pictures to the portfolio and display them anywhere on your website using a shortcode.
WP Portfolio also offers different options to customize your image portfolio without the need to write code or add custom CSS. You can also use the plugin to showcase a website portfolio and a video portfolio in WordPress.
Regenerate Thumbnails is a free WordPress plugin for photographers and is super easy to use. It helps you regenerate all thumbnails sizes for any image you’ve uploaded in the Media Library.
When you upload an image in WordPress, it automatically saves your images into multiple sizes. Your WordPress theme can also add additional image sizes. However, when new sizes are added to WordPress, the old photos are not available in those new sizes.
Regenerate Thumbnails solves this issue, and it is a must-have tool for all WordPress photography sites. You can quickly turn any image into a thumbnail and in any size using the plugin.
Image Widget is a handy plugin that lets you display images in the widgets area like the sidebar on your website.
WordPress comes with an image widget that you can add to your sidebar, but the options are limited. The Image Widget plugin solves this problem by adding a more customizable image widget to your WordPress site. It’s also responsive so it will look good on any size screen.
Simply drag and drop the widget to any sidebar or add a widget block. Next, select an image or upload one from your computer. You can also add multiple image widgets in a sidebar.
EWWW Image Optimizer is another popular WordPress plugin that you can use on your photography website to optimize your images. It helps improve your website speed by compressing oversized images.
As a photographer, you will have many images in high resolution which will be large in size. These images can slow down your website and increase your site’s bounce rate.
With EWWW Image Optimizer, you can automatically compress these images to reduce their size and scale them to fit different device sizes. This way your users won’t have to wait for your photographs to load.
There is also an option to lazy load images and improve page load time. Lazy load allows your website to only load images when a user scrolls down to the specific picture.
Easy Watermark plugin allows you to add watermarks to image uploads in WordPress automatically. As a photographer, you may want to add watermarks to your photographs to protect them from theft or misuse.
You can choose an image, set transparency, and watermark position. The plugin offers different formats for your image watermark, including JPG, PNG, or GIF formats.
WP Rocket is a must-have plugin for any website, especially for photographers. It helps speed up your site which is important for your WordPress SEO.
Speed is an important factor for all websites. For photography websites, it is even more critical because images are usually the most time-consuming elements on the page.
Imsanity is one of the best WordPress photography plugins that help to resize and save storage space.
When you transfer images from your camera and mobile devices, they are usually high-resolution images with image sizes reaching 3MB to 24MB+ per image.
Imsanity allows you to define more reasonable image sizes for the images you upload to WordPress. This not only saves you bandwidth but also makes your website faster with a better user experience.
The plugin will automatically scale down the images to the configured size and offer a bulk image resize option.
With OptinMonster, you can build an email list for your photography website. That’s because most people who find your website through search engines and other sources will probably never find your website again.
This is where getting people to subscribe to your newsletter can be beneficial. As a photographer, you can stay in touch with your audience, share your latest work via email, and get people to visit your website again.
Besides that, an email list can also help you get more clients. You can build your brand, increase awareness with your subscribers, and convert subscribers into paying customers.
OptinMonster is the perfect solution for converting visitors into subscribers and customers. Please take a look at our case study where we increased our email subscribers by more than 600% using OptinMonster.
For instance, you can create different membership levels and offer exclusive content about photography like downloadable pictures, blog posts, podcasts, eBooks, and more to only logged-in users with a paid subscription.
Besides that, MemberPress is great for selling online courses. You can create a professional photography course for your audience and use the plugin to monetize your website.
Other features offered by the plugin include creating a registration form, restricting permission, and managing your transactions.
Using the plugin, you can sell your photographs to your visitors and make more money. It is very easy to use and offers seamless integration with payment services like PayPal and Stripe.
You get a full shopping cart with Easy Digital Downloads along with different customer management features. For instance, you can view, edit, or delete customer records, track customer activity, and more.
Besides that, the plugin lets you track your earnings and shows a report inside the WordPress dashboard. You can also create discount codes using the plugin to boost sales.
