 What's up everyone so do you got a wordpress WooCommerce website and well the emails are just not working like they're supposed to maybe they're going into the spam or junk mail maybe they're just taking a whole long time to go through you know like when you select on lost password and you're waiting from that link from WordPress they could be getting flagged for phishing or possibly they're just not coming through at all well in SMTP it solves all these and if you have a wordpress especially if you have a WooCommerce website you have to have an SMTP connected to it in order for the emails that are coming out of your website to work properly and reliably now setting up an SMTP with cloudways is super easy to do and in this video we're going to focus specifically on setting it up with cloudways now there's several different ways and other services you could use but we use cloudways and the way I'm going to show you I want to take you through step by step that way even if you're non-technical you don't know anything about hosting or if you never even heard the word or term SMTP you could follow along and you'll be able to achieve this by the end of the video now real quick before we get into tutorial if you're wondering what cloudways is it's a hosting provider that does cloud-based hosting and it's what we use I have a design business we build several websites for clients and we also do wordpress maintenance so we maintain and manage many many sites and all of them are on cloudways so and I already made a video about why we do this I'll put a link to that video inside the description I'll also put a link to cloudways as well it does help support this channel if you want to get cloudways we use it I've been using it now for two years and one thing to check out too when you're there check out digital ocean premium they just came out with it I probably will make another video on it but basically what digital ocean premium is think of it as like an old MacBook Pro you know it's a couple years old maybe a few years old and then you buy a new one it's got new processors a brand new chip on it it's got you know the faster SSD and it just runs a whole lot faster well that's what digital ocean premium is you had digital ocean which was a fast server fast hosting now you got digital ocean premium which is an upgraded version and I've been running tests and beginning great results with enough of that though let's go ahead and just dive into this tutorial which you came here for so first off let's go ahead and open up your windows all right so what we want to do to start off with we want to open up four windows that way everything is prepared the first one is go to your website and go to the back end of your dashboard and make sure that is open on the second window go to your cloudways and make sure you're logged in in the back you should be here on your servers right here on the third tab we want to make sure that you have opened your dns management now this is going to be the dns for the url that you are using so whatever your website is and wherever you bought it from you got to go to your dns settings i'm using uh go daddy right here so this is what go daddy will look like uh but it's all going to depend on where you got your domain you want to go to your dns records wherever that is at in your domain your records will be very similar to this and what i show you is going to work on well all of them it'll work on yours it might look a little different but it's going to work the next one is we want to open up this window right here and i got a link to this the link to this window is in the description please open that one up as well because the reason why we need this window here is if we scroll down we're going to see right here this information so you see right here spf and then we got this information now these are the records we need to add into the dns so what we're going to do is we're going to take these records and a couple more and we're going to put them right into here into your dns records so let's go ahead and start by doing that first so there's going to be four of them to add and just in case his web page changes i'm also going to add this inside description as well and this is basically the records typed out so i'll include this too because sometimes blog posts go down you might be watching this two years from now okay so first one right here we need to open up a text record so go over to your records select on add and you want to choose text and we're just going to copy and paste this stuff in so we got the ads so you can put the ad right there you want to put your text value text value right there and you can put this at as low as you want i'm going to do custom and i'm going to do 600 seconds so that way it goes a little bit faster click save and one thing too if you can't put at you could also just put your domain some some dns records are a little bit different so it's either going to be an ad or might just be your domain all right click on save let's go to the next one and now we got to add this d kim record right here it's another text so let's go ahead and click on add select on text scroll that up there and then let's copy and paste this we'll put in the api domain key we're going to put that into the host and then we'll put the text value it's a long one right here so we'll click that one and then same thing right here on the ttl we're going to put custom and 600 and what this ttl does is it's basically saying how long do we want to have this to take effect and i want to get it as quick as possible all right let's go to the next one and now we're going to do the tracking this one right here we're going to add a c name so let's go back here click on add and then we're going to go to a c name let me scroll that back down all right for the name host alias we're going to put in tracking all right then the value or points to is going to be the elastic api for elastic mail dot com and then again let's go ahead and put custom and put 600 seconds and save and now there's just one more don't worry about the mx what we need to do is our d mark right here this gives you several different options don't worry about all the options that gets into more technical stuff we just needed to connect so let's just choose option number one so this one is going to be a text let's go back here select on add then we'll do text and for the host name or alias name let's go ahead and put this underscore d mark and then for the text value let's go copy and paste this over and again let's put 600 seconds all right and that's it now we're good to go on the dns the dns is all set up correctly now let's go over to your cloudways so navigate over to cloudways to the back and up here in this little box right here this little uh three or nine grid box click on that and we're going to select right here on add-ons so choose add-ons and then back here we're going to look for elastic email so this is the smtp that we're using it's the name of the smtp that's built in with cloudways as you can see we're already using it in fact we're using a lot of it because we have a lot of websites uh being used on here in fact look at the number right here we got 61 almost 6200 websites already this month and we're only halfway in the month right now all right so yours is probably going to look empty what you want to do is click on the little pencil and select which planning one now it's super cheap if you just got one website you could just start off on the small plan a thousand emails for 10 cents a month uh or you could just be on the safe side and do like 3000 or 5000 so you just need to choose which package you want select it and then select on the update subscription once you have that navigate back over to your servers and find the server that your website is on that you want to connect it to click on your server so this is a server i'm going to connect it to right now right down here on the bottom go to smtp select on that and then choose the smtp you want to use now you could use your own like i said in the beginning of the video there are other options for smtps you don't have to use cloudways uh built-in smtp you could use a third party including gmail for this one though we're going to use cloudways built-in because it's a lot easier i love having everything centralized it's just one of the things i like about cloudways is i have everything in just one spot is not it doesn't cost anything barely so let's go ahead and select on elastic email and enable it all right and then you will get a confirmation message up here shows you that everything is good it's been enabled now you have the option to send a test email but first i want to verify everything is connecting there's one more step we need to do on our website as well so now go back over to the dashboard of your website and go to plugins and here we're going to add an additional plugin you can just put an smtp right here and the one we're looking for will come up at the top and go ahead and choose the wp mail right here and install that one and we do not need to do the wizard right now let's just go ahead and click on go back to the dashboard there's only one thing that we need to do it's quite easy actually so don't worry about pro we don't need a pro version you don't need to put any of that in just go ahead and make sure you got the right email in there the email is coming from your website what email do you want it to show so it could be your business email could be like hello at whatever your website domain is you want to make sure this is the email that your customers or your audience is going to see same thing here you can go ahead and put in your name you can go ahead and put in your real name your company name like right here i will put in like jeffree because that's what i would like people to see when they get my email and i would probably also put in right here hello at lightbox and then i would also click on force from name i don't worry about the return path you could put it on or off but right here this is the important part right here so these are the other services that i was talking about these are the different ones that you could use but we're not using any of those so all we're going to do is leave it on php that's it now let's go back over to cloudways and make sure everything is connected and working like it should so go back to cloudways go back to your add-ons select add-on and now once you're on your add-on page navigate back down to elastic email and click right here on this little shield icon and here we're going to verify that everything is connected and running right this will tell us if everything is right on here if everything is connected correctly so let's give it a try put in your domain select on verify domain it could take a few minutes or a few seconds and that was a few seconds it was quick and we can see everything is in the green now if something wasn't connected between all these it'll tell us it'll be red and then we could go and find out what it is and one thing that is great too about cloudways is if it's red and you're stuck you could just go right over here to need a hand and you could go ahead and select on a live chat and talk to somebody right away it's pretty great i haven't seen this with another host i'm sure there might be another one but i haven't had that before so everything is looking good now let's go ahead and go back over to our server i want to check it out and run a quick test to myself make sure everything is good go ahead and select on your server go back down to smtp and then from here you could go ahead and send a test email and that's it your website should be all connected now and it should be sending out emails just like it's supposed to do i really hope this video was useful for you that it was easy to follow along let me know if you have any questions drop them in the comments i get back to everybody also if you have anything else that you would like me to show on cloudways let me know i've been using this platform now for a couple of years there's more things that we could do with it and i'd be happy to show you so i'll be back again soon with more web design related content thank you