On today’s episode, we’re going to talk about how to set up and configure a custom email address with our WordPress site right here on Your Website Engineer podcast, episode number 351. Hello, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of Your Website Engineer podcast. My name is Dustin Hartzler and today we are going to dive in – talking about custom email addresses and how to set those up with our current WordPress site. Before we do that though, I do have four announcements that I want to share with you. A plugin of the week, and then we’ll dive right in. In the way of news, another piece of news comes out of WordPress.com. And it is all about creating a simple payment button on your website without having to add any code. It used to be back in the day when you wanted to add some sort of payment option on a WordPress site, you had to go and get an invite code from PayPal. It was just kind of a clunky process.

It wasn’t easy to do and it was just really kind of a pain. Now, there is a brand new button in the media area. This is for, I guess, for WordPress.com premium and business users. And you can go and add a payment. And it just works really, really simply. And it is kind of a cool, new feature that WordPress.com has added in the last week. So, that is something to check out if you are a WordPress.com user. And for our sub hosted users who are using, I think Security Pro, there is a new feature inside of this called WordPress Security Check Pro. And it includes a one click WordPress security check to make sure that you are secure in WordPress and easiest and least complicated way possible. The latest version of iTheme Security Pro now includes two automated server checks to make sure that you’re using the recommended features and settings inside your WordPress site.

So, if you’re using iTheme Security Pro, go on over and update that, and make you’re using the latest version. From WP Tavern this week, WordPress.org is looking on adding some sort of page to help users understand the benefits of upgrading PHP. From the self hosted WordPress stats page, it shows that 14.2 percent of all sites are already using this PHP 7.0 and higher. 40.6 percent of sites are using PHP 5.6 which is no longer being supported, but will receive security fixes until January 2019. And then that leaves 45.2 percent of all WordPress running an older, insecure version of PHP that has reached its end of life and will no longer receive security updates. So, this is a big deal and they’re just trying to figure out a way to let people know why it’s important to update, and keep the software up to date, and running. And you’re getting better features out of Word Press; things are going to go much quicker.

The performance is much better in PHP 7. Lots of great benefits for upgrading. So, if you haven’t upgraded, I highly recommend upgrading. But the WordPress team is looking at a way to kind of share these benefits with others. So, that is another piece of news. And then the other piece of news this week from WP Tavern is there is a new plugin called Merlin WP Onboarding Wizard. And this is an open source project that is setup to help premium theme owners allow people to setup their websites much quicker. So, basically it is kind of a – it’s a way that a theme owner can go ahead, and setup, and configure how Merlin works. And when somebody installs their theme, it’ll walk them through the key pieces of information that need to be setup that can be added to the theme settings.
And then, it just helps get a website up from a blank template – just upload it into the WordPress dashboard and it will actually start functioning or have some visuals right there when they’re done with this onboarding process. This is a neat article and it’s got a video that’s setup to kind of show you and walk you through how this works. And I’ve got a link in the show notes to head on over to WP Tavern and read the article in full. So, that’s the last thing I have in way of announcements. I do want to let you know that this week I’m recording this just a little bit early because I will be at Podcast Movement in Anaheim when this show comes out on Wednesday. And so, I’ll be there for the week, or it’s Tuesday through Saturday.

And I will be hanging out there, helping people figure out WordPress questions, and answers, and giving free swag, and helping podcasters on – I’ll actually be doing a live podcast with some of colleagues live on the expo floor at Podcast Movement. So, that’ll be a lot of fun. You’ll hear that conversation in just a couple of weeks when I get, and get it all edited, and ready to go. So, that’s kind of some updates from what’s happening this week and in the WordPress space. In there is a plugin for that section. There’s more than 50,000 plugins in the WordPress repository that are free and that’s not counting all the premium ones that are there. So, there are tens of thousands of plugins that we can add to our WordPress just to make them better. And this weekend, I wanted to share one with you that is called Snippy.

And Snippy is a plugin that will allow you to quickly create your own custom short codes without using any PHP which is pretty cool. It is built on combining bits, it’s called. And a bit can be a file like a style sheet, or a script, or a piece of code like HTML, TSS, or Java Script. And then the code can contain placeholders. So, example, like they have an example here on the WordPress repository page on how you can turn an iFrame for a YouTube imbed and you can basically just kind of take out the part that changes on every YouTube imbed which is the ID value at the end. It’s youtube.com/imbed/ you know a bunch of whatever. And that’s usually pretty consistent except for the last random characters. And so, you can just kind of build out this custom short code and then you can just create your own that’s basically YouTube in square brackets. And then type in the ID and you’re ready to go.

So, you have a little short code that way, especially if you wanted to customize and make sure all of your YouTube videos are the exact same size or whatever. It’s a pretty neat plugin and I highly recommend checking it out if you want to start building your own short codes without having to know any PHP. Alright. Today let’s go ahead and talking about creating our own custom email address. And this was a big beef and I had a podcast episode that I did. I think it was number 14 or 18. It’s been years ago that I talked about this and this was a big beef when I was building websites for clients in the fact that they had this nice custom website that had just been created. I mean their email address on their contact form goes to joe@aol.com. And that’s probably not the best setup, especially since you already have a domain name. You just might as well use that.

So, my thing was – I was urging customers and people to use the domain they already purchased. They already have a website with a custom domain name. It’s very simple to setup an email address to have a custom email address. So, for example, I have dustin@yourwebsitenegineer.com. And that’s where all the contact form comes. There’s links on my website to say if you need to email me, you can use that link, and whatnot. And so, that’s kind of where we’re going to go today. We’re going to dive in and how are we going to set these up? We’ve got two different options when it comes to setting up these custom email addresses. We can set them up with our current webhosting. So, if you’re using like Bluehost or GoDaddy or some of these other places, they have email just built right in with the hosting plan that you.

And then the other method is to use a dedicated service provider, like you can use Microsoft – has an option. Google apps, or the – G Suite it’s called. And those are some options as well. There are lots of different companies that are out there that you can use. And I’ll highlight just a few here in a little bit. Okay, let’s dive in and talk about setting up with your webhosting package already. And this one, I will say that it is a little bit easier because there’s not really any technical things that you have to do. It’s pretty basic. So, let’s go ahead and dive in. First, we already have our domain name. We already – well, we’ll just establish that we’ve got our domain name setup and the website is up and running. And we’re going to head on over to our dashboard. And I’m just going to highlight and walk through the steps on Bluehost.

You can do this – it’s a little bit differently depending on the different cPanels that may be used for your web hosting company. But inside of Bluehost, you’ll see an area that’s called email manager. And you can click on this and it’s going to bring up a create email address box or a webpage. And all you have to do is come up with the name that you want for your email address, and then type a password, and then retype the password. That’s all you have to do. It basically – you just have to figure out what you want your email address to be. And this is another kind of key point, especially when you are trying to create a system if you’re going to have more than one employee someday.

You kind of have to think through, “Okay, how are we going to set this up? Is it just going first name @website.com? Is it going to be last name @website.com? Is it going to be first name and last initial @website.com?” You just have to kind of think through, “Or will it be dustin.hartzler@website.com?” You just have to kind of think it through and figure out – do you want to be consistent? You just want to pick your name first, and then if you hire another person that has the same name, do you just kind of make up a new email address for them with a different standard? Just think through exactly what you want to – how you want this to be setup. So, once you do that, once you’ve added – you’ve created the name by basically picking the stuff that comes the @ symbol, and then you add a person, then that’s it. That’s all you have to do.

You hit create, and you do this for all the employees, or all the email addresses you want to setup. Another thing that you can do inside the same area is – maybe you want to setup an email forward option. And this is something in case you want to get multiple – maybe you want to have contact@yourwebsite.com or maybe you need sales@. And then those emails forward onto other people, then you can go ahead and set that up as well inside the same area. And the cool part about doing this inside the dashboard or inside of your hosting company is that since your name servers are pointed to your hosting company – and like we talked about in a couple episodes ago – there’s no need for additional configuration. All you have to do is – you just create these email accounts, and then they’ll just automatically start working.

And once you have them setup, usually inside of Bluehost, things like GoDaddy, inside of H2Hosting, whatever – they will have options and they’ll have the settings so that you can plug this information into your email client. Most of the time with the shared hosting environments, and the email clients that are built in, or the email – the visuals are just – they’re not very good. They don’t have keyboard shortcuts. They don’t have – they’re just not robust mail programs. They’re just kind of the basic mail viewers. And so, I’d recommend if you do go this route and you do want to setup an email account, then you want to bring those into your Apple mail, or your Outlook, or Windows mail, or whatever you may be using to look at your email. I definitely recommend bringing those into some sort of service because it’s just not a great interface.

I mean the big thing is if you’ve got your mail – your email is something that it’s just a lot of text basically. So, it doesn’t have to have this pretty interface to run, but in order to be most efficient with email, I think it’s best to use Apple mail, etc. You can also bring in these email accounts to Gmail if you have a regular Gmail account for your personal account, you can actually bring those in as well if you go under – if you click on the gear icon, and then go to settings. And then under accounts and import, you can add a mail account. And you basically just add your username and password, and there’s a few other pieces of information that you’ll need from your Bluehost account, and it will just start bringing your messages right into Gmail. So, you’ll be able to – you have one inbox in Gmail. And so, you may have your personal email and your business email.

And you can answer those email. And when you answer a business email, it sends out with the business email address as the from. And if you answer personal emails, it will send as personal emails. So, that’s pretty cool and that’s a great way to set that up. That’s kind of how I have mine setup. I have one main Google Suite account and we’ll talk about that in just a second. And then, I have two or three different email addresses that just come into that. And so, I just have one email box per say, but then if I want to map it to a phone – connect it with my phone, or my iPad, or something. Then I only have to setup one account and I don’t have to setup multiple accounts. So, that seems to work for me. And so, I’m using the Gmail option that I just talked about. So, that’s the first way. Just go into whatever hosting company you have. If they have the ability to do email, then you can set that up.

Now one thing that I don’t like about doing it is I feel that email is very, very important especially for a business owner to make sure that their email is always up, always running, and what happens if your website goes down? If your website goes down or there’s some issue with the server that your website’s on, your email’s going to go down as well. And that’s the worst because people can’t email you that they have a problem, or they tried to buy something, or whatever because the website’s down and your email’s down. The second way to do this is with a dedicated email service provider and there are lots of them like G Suite, like I talked about earlier. And there’s FastMail, and ProtonMail, Blastmail, and Greatmail. There are a lot of them out there. But the way that they work is all virtually the same.

I’m going to talk through the G Suite’s – how that setups in a little bit. G Suite is also pretty nice. It does cost $5 per month or it’s $50 per year. So, you save two months if you buy the whole year out in advance. You also – with that you get 30 gigs worth of email storage which is an awful lot. You can manage your email while you’re offline. You can do it with the Gmail app on mobile devices. It works with Outlook and all these different platforms. You can have up to 30 email aliases, and so what that means is the aliases are – my main account is dustine@yourwebsiteengineer.com. But I have contact as yourwebsiteengineer.com and that forwards it. So, basically, an email alias is a forward. There are lots of features for using G Suite and that’s why I’m going to talk through it today.

So basically, what you do is you go to – I’ll have a link in the show notes. But you’re looking for the link for Google apps for work. And you click on the get started button, and then you just fill in some pretty basic information. And it’ll kind of set things up for you in the background. You’ll be able to setup and configure as an admin what different users on your account get. And so, if you wanted to turn off Google docs for all users, you could do that or if you want have Google calendar enabled for certain people, you can do all that. You can manage all of those things. Once you get the entire account setup, then there’s one piece of metadata that you have to add to your domain, add to your WordPress site that Google knows you own the domain. And then once you’ve done, then you can go ahead and you can set things up.

The big key piece – and this goes back to a couple episodes ago when we were talking about named services and DNS record. The MX records are the ones that are for the mailbox. And so, you have to go into wherever your DNS settings are set up, and you have to go in, and add these five custom MX records for Google apps. And then, that makes sure that everything is setup, and working properly, and it knows when someone routes a mail through your websiteengineer.com that it knows to go through Gmail and not through my – the email client that’s running on my web host. And so, I’m not going to go through all the steps of setting up Gmail itself because it’s just a lot of clicking, and setting things up, and you put in the name that you need, and – you can do all kinds of things with Google aps and Google suites.

And it’s really a simple, straightforward process and it is for all of these different services. You basically go through their welcome screen, their onboarding screen, and then you set everything up with their company, and their account. And then once that’s done, you update your MX records. And they work kind of separately. I still go to mail.google.com for logging into my account. And then I type in – instead of typing in just your Gmail address or your user ID for Gmail, then you would type dustin@yourwebsiteengineer.com, and then you type in your full password. And then it just knows that, okay, you’ve set it up for yourwebsiteengineer.com and all of my email messages are in there. And so, I really like this in the fact that – my website goes down, people can still email me. If my email goes down, my website’s still up.

So, you have that flexibility of – you’re not going to lose both of your services at the same if something would happen to one or the other. So, that’s the benefit of using a dedicated email service provider. Also, the interfaces are much nicer. I don’t know if you’ve ever used Gmail before, but Gmail interface is pretty nice. They’ve got a lot of keyboard shortcuts. It’s all really built in and even with using the G Suite account, you can still merge your accounts together like I said earlier have I have for yourwebsiteengineer.com, I have a few inboxes that all come into one spot. Then I only have to manage one account, and one Google docs account, and one Gmail calendar, and all that stuff. So, there’s a lot of functionality.

There’s a lot of features, but the big take away from this week’s episode is – I just want to share that it’s really important to have a custom email address that you can put on your website that you can be proud of that has yourname@yourwebsite.com. That’s the big take away. If you’re not doing that, I highly recommend that be the take away of the week, the action item, something to work on. And again, you can do it completely free if you’re using your web hosting package and you can do that. There’s also email options that I didn’t cover today, but you can get some email boxes just from your domain registrar. I know that Hover does the same thing. You can just create a simple email address that you connect to your domain and you can have that all setup at Hover. That’s only a few dollars per month, or even a few dollars per year to have that set up, or even the email forward.

You could just setup dustin@yourwebsiteengineer.com instead of having that be an inbox itself, I could just setup that up to forward to somewhere else. And you could set that up through your domain registrar. So, in closing, there are options. You have lots of options. There are free options, there’s paid options. Obviously, the paid options are going to be a little bit more robust. They’re going to provide more support, like if you have problems setting up G suite or the Microsoft 360 email, or whatever. You’ll have that opportunity to contact support, and have them help you out, and figure out what may be going wrong. So, that’s the technical jargon that I wanted to share.

We’re continuing this series this month just talking about the technical details of setting up a website because this is not all about website and the WordPress dashboard. There’s so much more that goes on to make sure that you have a viable business online and that all the pieces of the puzzle are working together. And so, this week, that’s what I wanted to share was just about setting up a custom email address. I’m having fun at Podcast Movement and I’ll be back next week with another episode. Until then, take care and we’ll talk to you again soon. Bye-bye. For more great WordPress information, head on over to yourwebsiteengineer.com.