WooCommerce Emails Not Sending (New Order and Customer Emails)

WooCommerce order emails are not sending — you get no "New order" notification, or customers never receive their order confirmation, even though orders are showing up in your dashboard.

Common signs of this issue

• WooCommerce emails are not sending: orders appear under WooCommerce, Orders, but no "New order" email reaches you.
• Customers say they never got an order confirmation or "Your order is being processed" email.
• Some emails arrive and others do not — for example, admin emails work but customer emails never show up, or the reverse.
• Emails arrive hours late, in bursts, or only after someone logs in to the dashboard.
• Password reset and contact form emails from the same site are also missing or landing in spam.
• The order notes on an order do not mention any email being sent, or orders sit on Pending payment and never move to Processing.

Safe checks you can do yourself

None of these require sharing passwords with anyone.

• Go to WooCommerce, Settings, Emails and look at the list. Each email type (New order, Processing order, Completed order, and so on) has its own Enabled switch and recipient. Click Manage on New order and confirm it is enabled and the recipient address is one you actually read — an old staff address or a typo here is a very common cause.
• Check the order status. The customer confirmation is triggered when an order reaches Processing (or On hold for bank transfer and cheque), and the admin New order email fires on similar status changes. If orders are stuck on Pending payment, WooCommerce is waiting for the payment gateway and will not send those emails yet.
• Open one affected order and read the Order notes panel on the right. Status changes and some email events are logged there, which tells you whether WooCommerce thinks it tried to send.
• Check spam, junk, and any filtering rules in the receiving inbox, and ask one customer to check theirs. Order emails with product tables and links are often filtered, especially when sent from a shared hosting server.
• Look at the From address at the bottom of WooCommerce, Settings, Emails (sender options). If it is a Gmail, Yahoo, or Outlook address, or a domain the server is not allowed to send for, receiving servers are likely to reject or bin it. It should be an address on your own domain.
• Find out how the site sends mail. If there is no SMTP or email-sending plugin, WordPress hands mail to the hosting server's basic mail function, which is the least reliable option. Our guide to setting up WordPress SMTP explains the better route.
• If you already use an SMTP or email-sending plugin, use its test email feature and check its email log if it has one. A failed test or an authentication error points straight at the mail setup, not WooCommerce.
• Check scheduled tasks under Tools, Scheduled Actions. A long list of pending or failed actions — especially ones that are days old — suggests WordPress cron is not running properly, which can delay or block background jobs on some setups.
• Place a small test order yourself with a different email address and watch what happens: does the status change, does an order note appear, does either email arrive? One clean test tells you more than a dozen customer reports.

What this usually means

Most of the time WooCommerce is not the thing that is broken. It creates the email and hands it to WordPress, and WordPress hands it to whatever mail system the server has. If that last step is the hosting server's built-in mail with no proper authentication, messages are often silently dropped or filtered as spam by Gmail, Outlook, and business mail providers. The fix is sending through an authenticated service with SPF, DKIM, and DMARC set up for your domain — the same problem behind contact form emails not arriving.

The second big group is settings and status. An email type is switched off, the recipient is wrong, or the order never reaches the status that triggers the email. That last one catches many shop owners: if the payment gateway never confirms the payment, the order stays on Pending payment and neither the customer nor you get the usual emails. In that case the email problem is really a payment callback problem, covered in WooCommerce orders stuck on Pending payment.

Less often, the cause is background processing. WordPress runs scheduled jobs when someone visits the site, and some hosts or caching setups stop that from happening reliably. Emails queued for background sending, or the jobs that move orders along, then pile up. The same underlying issue causes missed scheduled posts. Plugins that customise or restyle emails, and conflicts after an update, round out the list.

What not to do

• Don't install several email or SMTP plugins at once. They can override each other and make the problem harder to trace.
• Don't use a free Gmail or Yahoo address as the From address for shop emails. It invites rejection and spam filtering.
• Don't manually change stuck orders to Processing just to trigger emails without checking the payment really went through.
• Don't resend emails to customers in bulk until you have confirmed the mail setup works, or you may end up sending duplicates later.
• Don't assume customers received their emails because you received yours. Admin and customer emails are separate and can fail separately.
• Don't ignore missing emails for weeks. Customers who get no confirmation often raise payment disputes or chargebacks.

When to get help

It is time for help if a test email from an SMTP plugin fails with authentication or connection errors you cannot interpret, if your DNS records need editing to fix SPF or DKIM, or if orders are stuck because payment confirmations never reach the site. Those are server, DNS, and gateway problems, and trial and error on a live shop costs real orders and customer trust. Someone experienced can read the mail logs, check the sending domain's reputation, and confirm whether cron and background jobs are actually running — usually in one sitting.

Glenn, who runs WebsiteSelfHelp, sorts out missing WooCommerce order emails for small shops, from the mail setup to the order statuses behind it. Ask for a direct review, tell him which emails are going missing, and you will get a straight answer on the cause and the fix — no passwords needed to start.

Frequently asked questions

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