How to set up Cloudflare Email Service for transactional emails on WordPress

Want to configure WordPress Cloudflare Email Service transactional emails?

With Gravity SMTP, you can easily send your WordPress site’s emails using the Cloudflare Email Service API, while also accessing other useful tools to improve your site’s emails.

In this post, we’ll briefly introduce you to Cloudflare Email Service and Gravity SMTP and how the two tools work together for WordPress transactional emails.

Then, we’ll show you step-by-step how to set up WordPress Cloudflare Email Service sending using Gravity SMTP.

Let’s get into it…

Why use Cloudflare Email Service for WordPress transactional emails?

If you’re already using Cloudflare for your WordPress website, Cloudflare Email Service offers an easy solution to also send all of your WordPress site’s transactional emails.

It gives you the reliability of Cloudflare’s massive infrastructure, while also offering an easy API setup process.

You also get detailed reporting for your emails, along with other key features like suppression lists.

For more advanced users, Cloudflare Workers can also open up additional ways to send/trigger emails beyond your WordPress website.

Note: You must be using Cloudflare’s DNS/nameservers for your WordPress website in order to use Cloudflare Email Service. If you’re not already using Cloudflare DNS (or not open to using it), you might want to consider a different transactional service.

With that being said, you do not need to have the reverse proxy service enabled. You can just use Cloudflare’s DNS without any other Cloudflare services.

Basically, if you’re already using Cloudflare for your WordPress site, using Cloudflare Email Service for your site’s transactional emails lets you keep everything in one dashboard/ecosystem.

Cloudflare Email Service pricing

To use Cloudflare Email Service for WordPress transactional emails, you’ll need a paid Cloudflare Workers plan.

The base subscription fee for a paid Cloudflare Workers plan is $5 per month, which includes 3,000 outbound emails per month at no extra cost.

If you need to send more than 3,000 emails per month, you’ll pay just $0.35 per 1,000 additional emails.

For example, the total cost to send 50,000 emails per month would be $21.45:

• $5 for the base Cloudflare Workers plan and 3,000 included emails
• $16.45 for the other 47,000 emails (47*0.35)

How Gravity SMTP helps you use Cloudflare Email Service on WordPress

Gravity SMTP  is a WordPress SMTP plugin that offers a dedicated integration for the Cloudflare Email Service API.

It lets you easily send all of your site’s transactional emails using Cloudflare Email Service, while also adding lots of other useful features:

• Email reports – View detailed information about your site’s email sending, including open rates, top sending sources, top recipients, and more.
• Email logging – Log every single email that your site sends. See technical details, content, design, and attachments for each email. Or, disable any logging features that you don’t want to use.
• Backup email sending methods – Choose a backup email sending service that Gravity SMTP will automatically use if Cloudflare Email Service fails for any reason.
• Email resends – Manually resend any email with a few clicks.
• In-dashboard suppressions – Set up email suppressions directly from your WordPress dashboard, rather than needing to work through Cloudflare.
• Dedicated support – Get direct, one-on-one support from the friendly Gravity Forms team if you ever need help with anything.

Gravity SMTP is available at no extra cost to anyone holding the Gravity Forms Elite, Nonprofit, or Developer licenses.

While Gravity SMTP is available as part of your Gravity Forms license, it’s still a standalone plugin. You do not need to have Gravity Forms installed to use Gravity SMTP, though Gravity SMTP does work well for sending form notification emails using a transactional email service.

How to set up WordPress Cloudflare Email Service with Gravity SMTP

Now, let’s get into the full step-by-step guide on how to set up the Cloudflare Email Service WordPress integration with Gravity SMTP.

1. Install the Gravity SMTP plugin

To get started, make sure to install and activate the Gravity SMTP plugin on the site where you want to use Cloudflare Email Service.

Gravity SMTP is currently available for free to anyone holding the Gravity Forms Elite or Nonprofit licenses (or the legacy Developer license). You can download it from your Gravity account.

2. Add your website to Cloudflare and set up Cloudflare DNS (if not already using)

As we mentioned earlier, your website needs to be using Cloudflare DNS/nameservers in order to send emails using Cloudflare Email Service.

If you’ve already added your site to Cloudflare and are using its DNS, you can skip ahead to the next step. Otherwise, you’ll need to set up your site before continuing.

Here’s a quick guide on how to do that:

1. Register for a free Cloudflare account, if you don’t already have one.
2. Add your WordPress site’s domain name to Cloudflare – here’s Cloudflare’s documentation on how to do it. It’s totally fine to use Cloudflare’s free plan.
3. Update your domain name’s nameservers to use the nameservers that Cloudflare provides in the onboarding process. You can do this at your domain registrar (the service that you used to purchase your domain name). Or, if you got your domain name through your web hosting service, you’ll usually update nameservers via your hosting account dashboard.

Once you’ve added your WordPress site, you should see it show up in your Cloudflare dashboard.

3. Purchase Cloudflare Workers Paid (if you haven’t already)

As we mentioned earlier, you currently need a Workers Paid plan to use Cloudflare Email Service as a transactional email service. 

If you aren’t already subscribed to Workers Paid, you’ll need to do so now before advancing. 

Again, it costs $5 per month for the base plan, which includes 3,000 emails per month at no extra cost. If you send more than 3,000 emails per month, you’ll pay just $0.35 for each additional 1,000 emails you send.

To purchase Workers Paid, open your main Cloudflare dashboard. Then, go to Compute → Email Service → Email Sending. Then, click the Purchase Workers Paid button.

On the next screen, click the Upgrade button to move from the default free Workers plan to Workers Paid.

To finish things out, you’ll be prompted to choose/enter your payment details.

4. Onboard your domain name to Cloudflare Email Service

In order to use Cloudflare Email Service, you need to go beyond just configuring Cloudflare’s DNS and also onboard your domain name to Cloudflare Email Service.

This involves adding some DNS records to your domain, which is required for any transactional email service. The advantage of Cloudflare Email Service, though, is that Cloudflare can do it for you.

However, you’ll still need to click the buttons to give Cloudflare permission to do this, which is why it requires an extra step.

Once you’ve subscribed to Workers Paid, go back to the Cloudflare Email Service dashboard – Compute → Email Service → Email Sending.

Then, click the Onboard Domain button.

On the next screen, use the Zone drop-down search to choose the domain name of your WordPress website. The drop-down will automatically populate with all of the domain names that you’ve added to Cloudflare.

If you want to send from a subdomain ([email protected]), you can also specify a Subdomain. Leave the Subdomain field blank if you want to send from your top-level domain name (e.g. [email protected]).

Once you’ve done that, click the Done button and Cloudflare will automatically add the relevant DNS records for you.

You should be taken to your domain’s email sending dashboard, which should show its Status as “Enabled” and its DNS records as “Configured”.

5. Create a Cloudflare API token

Next, you need to create a Cloudflare API token, which is what Gravity SMTP will use to connect to Cloudflare Email Service.

In the Cloudflare dashboard, click on the user profile icon in the top-right corner and select Profile from the drop-down. Then, select the API Tokens option in the My Profile menu. Or, you can click this link to go straight to the correct page.

In the User API Tokens interface, click the Create Token button.

On the next screen, click Get Started next to Create Custom Token to create a token with specific permissions.

First, give your token an internal Token name. For example, “Gravity SMTP Email Sending”.

Then, add the following Permissions:

• Account > Email Sending > Edit (for sending emails)
• Zone > Zone > Read (for domain validation)

You can leave the other settings as their defaults.

Once you’ve added the permissions, click Continue to summary.

Review the settings for your token. Then, click Create Token to finalize everything.

Cloudflare will then display your API token. Copy this value to a safe spot because you’ll need it in the next step and Cloudflare will only display it one time.

If you accidentally misplace it, you can just repeat these same steps to create a new token.

6. Connect Gravity SMTP to Cloudflare Email Service

Once you have your Cloudflare API token, you’re ready to connect Gravity SMTP to Cloudflare Email Service:

1. Open your WordPress dashboard.
2. Go to SMTP → Settings in the dashboard sidebar.
3. Select the Integrations tab inside the Gravity SMTP settings area.
4. Click the Plus icon to add a new integration.

This will open a slide-out. Find and select Cloudflare in the list of available integrations.

You’ll then be prompted to set up the integration.

At the top, you need to add two pieces of information:

• Account ID – You’ll need to paste in your Cloudflare Account ID. We’ll show you how to find this below.
• API Token – This is the API token that you created in the previous step.

Here are two ways to find your Cloudflare Account ID:

• Open the dashboard for your WordPress site’s domain name in Cloudflare. Find the API section at the bottom of the sidebar on the right side and copy the value under Account ID (screenshot below).
• Look at the URL of your Cloudflare Account home dashboard page. The Account ID will be the string of numbers and letters located between “cloudflare.com/” and “/home”.

Once you’ve added those two pieces of information, you can configure a few additional options in the General Settings:

• Default From Email – Choose the default email address from which your emails will be sent. This email address must use your WordPress site’s domain name. That is, it must use the domain name that you onboarded to Cloudflare Email Service in step #4.
• Default From Name – Choose the default name from which your emails will be sent.
• Default Reply-To Email – You can choose any email address to be the reply-to email.

You can also use the toggles to choose whether or not to force other plugins on your site to send emails using these same details.

Once you’ve made your choices, click the Save & Enable button at the bottom.

Then, make sure that Cloudflare is set as your site’s primary email sending service in the integrations list.

You can verify this by looking for the Primary label next to Cloudflare. If needed, you can manually set Cloudflare as your site’s primary email service by clicking the three dots icon and selecting Set As Primary from the drop-down.

7. Send a test email using Cloudflare Email Service

To make sure that everything is working properly, we recommend sending a test email using Cloudflare Email Service.

To do this, you can use Gravity SMTP’s built-in email testing tool:

1. Go to SMTP → Tools in your WordPress dashboard.
2. Select the Send a Test tab if it’s not already selected by default.
3. Enter the email address to which you want to send a test email in the Send To box.
4. Enter the From email that you want to use in the Send From box. Make sure this uses the domain name that you onboarded to Cloudflare Email Service.
5. Make sure that Cloudflare is selected in the Send With drop-down.
6. Click Send Test.

If everything worked properly, you should see an “Email successfully sent” message appear. Then, if you open your email inbox, you should see an email that looks something like this.

If you encounter an error, you can find more detailed information in the full email log. We’ll cover how to use the email log a little later in this post.

8. Set up a backup email sending service (optional)

This step is 100% optional.

However, if the transactional emails that your site is sending are important to your business, Gravity SMTP gives gives you the ability to further improve the reliability of your site’s emails by selecting a secondary backup transactional email sending service.

This way, if an email ever fails to send via Cloudflare for any reason, Gravity SMTP can automatically resend that email using your backup service to ensure that it still gets delivered.

If you want to use a backup email sending service for Cloudflare, you’ll first need to connect your site to that service.

You can find dedicated tutorials for most of Gravity SMTP’s direct integrations below. Or, you’re always free to use the Custom SMTP option:

• Amazon SES
• Brevo
• Elastic Email
• Emailit
• Gmail / Google Workspace
• Mailchimp
• Mailersend
• Mailjet
• Mailgun
• Outlook / Microsoft 365
• Postmark
• Resend
• SendGrid
• SMTP2Go
• SparkPost
• Zoho Mail
• Custom SMTP

You can also find the integration documentation here.

Once you’ve connected to the service that you want to use, here’s how to set it as your site’s backup method:

1. Open the Gravity SMTP Integrations area (SMTP → Settings → Integrations).
2. Click the three dots icon next to the service.
3. Choose Set as Backup from the drop-down.
4. Verify that the Backup label appears next to the service.

How to monitor your site’s email usage

Once your site starts sending emails via Cloudflare, Gravity SMTP gives you a few ways to monitor everything.

First, you can go to SMTP → Dashboard to view high-level reporting. This includes open rates, top sending sources, and top email recipients.

To see more detail about individual emails, you can access the full email log by going to SMTP → Email Log.

You can use the buttons in the Action column to access email details, such as technical information and content (and attachments, if enabled). You can also easily resend an email if needed.

Cloudflare also offers its own reporting tools, which let you see bounce rates, spam complaint rates, spam rejection rates, and delivery rates.

Get started with WordPress Cloudflare Email Service sending today

If you’re already interested in using Cloudflare’s DNS for your website, Cloudflare Email Service can offer a convenient and affordable solution for sending your WordPress site’s transactional emails.

With Gravity SMTP, you can easily connect your WordPress site directly to the Cloudflare Email Service API, while also accessing other useful tools such as reporting, logging, alerts, backup sending services, and more.

Install Gravity SMTP today and follow this guide to get started with Cloudflare Email Service on your WordPress website.