*In the style of Sabrina Carpenter’s Manchild: Oh Boy.*
WordPress 6.9 rolled out to a lot of websites last week, and with it has come a massive issue: some people’s emails from their WordPress website have completely stopped arriving.
This is a huge problem. Why? Because it means you’re not getting notified about leads, orders, and important updates from your WordPress website. That can mean a damaged business reputation and thousands of dollars of potential projects lost. Business is built on leads and orders – so it’s critical that you’re receiving emails from your website.
So how do you fix the problem of emails not sending from your WordPress website? Especially if you’ve already browsed the LinkedIn posts and tech articles, but need plain English for non-IT people?
I gotchu!
Step 1: Check if your emails stopped working after the WordPress 6.9 update
Technically, the issue isn’t that emails aren’t working… it’s that you’re not receiving them. WordPress has changed how emails get sent out with the 6.9 update, and unless you fix your setup, they’ll skip your inbox and either go to spam or disappear into oblivion.
Technically, this change improves email reliability. But it also means WordPress is now managing your website’s emails itself, instead of your host and server system doing it. This broke things for many people (like me!), who had their emails managed at the server level.
To check if this is happening to you, go into your WordPress website dashboard. Click on your contact form area, and read the form submissions that have come through in the last 2 weeks or so.
Have these been landing in your email inbox (eg. your Gmail or Outlook account)? If not, it’s likely that your website emails have stopped working after the WordPress 6.9 update.
Even if you’re still getting emails from your WordPress website after the 6.9 update, you should check with your website designer or IT team and ask how they connected your email inbox. That way, you’ll know if you’re likely to be impacted in the future – even if things are still going fine right now. You need to make sure your setup works with the new WordPress system.
Step 2: Configure your SMTP properly
Older technology phasing out is just a fact of life, so sometimes you need to do tech updates to your business. It’s annoying, but this is one of those situations.
To make sure your website starts sending emails again after the WordPress 6.9 update, you need to reconfigure the connection between your email inbox and your WordPress website to the most modern standards.
This is easiest done through an SMTP plugin such as Fluent SMTP (which is free as of March 2026, but is a complicated process if you’re not tech-savvy – you’ll need to generate API keys). You can also try WP Mail SMTP (which apparently offers one-click connection, but will cost $100 per year on a subscription basis. And I think that’s in USD).
Alternatively, seek professional IT help to get your emails working again for a one-off fee. I’ve got a few connections, so you can reach out to me by email. I’ll introduce you to my recommended IT helpers.
In Summary
It’s really annoying when tech issues happen and you don’t know how to fix them. I get it – I’m a designer first, and a web person second. This means I know how anxiety-inducing it is when an IT problem happens and you have no idea how to fix it – a design course at uni doesn’t cover emails, after all!
But there are several methods available to you if your emails stopped working after the WordPress 6.9 update – and this is a great reminder about how important it is to have IT support (and insurance) to protect your small business.
In addition, issues like these are one of the reasons that I actually don’t recommend WordPress for a lot of my clients. I work with several tiny businesses such as bakers, psychologists, music teachers, and early childhood educators – and for them, a simple website on something like Squarespace provides what they need while getting rid of these tech headaches. Yes, WordPress is awesome… and it’s technically free… but the costs of hosting, plugins, and support can quickly add up while leaving you feeling disempowered.
Let me know in the comments if you encountered this issue with WordPress 6.9 – and how you solved it for your small business.