Looking for WP-SES.com?
WP SES is now WP Offload SES Lite
We recently acquired (and updated) WP SES. You can find the free WP SES plugin on the WordPress repo as WP Offload SES Lite.
But we also added a paid version that includes email support and other features you might find improves your experience of sending site emails with Amazon SES. Check out how the free and paid version compare below.
Features Missing From the Free Plugin
Email support
If you run into difficulty with WP Offload SES, you can easily submit an email support request via the Support tab inside the plugin. We don't provide technical support for the free plugin, so this is a big deal. Any active license will get you a prompt reply via email, but the Gold license or better will get you priority email support which assures that your request is assigned the highest priority.
Open & click reporting
It's important to be able to measure the engagement of your site emails. Are people actually opening certain emails? Are they clicking links? With that information, you can try to update an email's subject line and see if the open rate improves. Or update the email copy and see if more people click on the links. With WP Offload SES, you can access all of this instantly, from your WordPress dashboard. Although the free plugin tracks opens and clicks, it does not have reporting.
Auto-retry email sending failures
Every Amazon SES account has a max send rate. If you try to send more emails per second than your account rate, Amazon SES will return an error and refuse to send the email which could result in dropped emails if not handled properly. WP Offload SES is aware of your SES account's send rate and will stay within the limit, but in the event of a failed send (e.g. a networking issue) the robust queue system will retry sending those emails and keep track of failures. The free plugin will just report an error when you hit your send limit or if an email fails to send.
Manually retry email sending failures
Let’s say there was a networking issue that prevented your site from connecting to Amazon SES to send your email. WP Offload SES will automatically retry sending a few times before giving up and calling it a failure. If that happens, you can simply retry those failures once connectivity to Amazon SES is restored. With the free plugin there is no way to retry sending when a failure occurs.
Manually resend any sent emails
Let’s say that one of your users accidentally deleted a message that was sent to them. You can find that email in WP Offload SES and resend it in just a few clicks. No more manually assembling the pieces of the email you think they need because you don’t have a copy of the original email. With the free plugin there is no way to resend sent emails.
Search for any email
Amazon SES doesn’t log emails sent on its own, let alone allow you to search for a sent email. WP Offload SES logs every email sent and allows you to filter by date and search by recipient and/or email subject. There is no filtering or search functionality in the free plugin.
View a specific email
Both WP Offload SES Lite and WP Offload SES save the full content of every email sent through your WordPress site. But only WP Offload SES allows you to search for an email and view its contents. And because the free plugin saved all your past emails, when you upgrade to WP Offload SES you’ll be able to search and view all those past emails.
Analyze engagement for a specific email
Would you like to know if a customer has viewed a specific email they’ve been sent? Or maybe you want to know if they’ve clicked the links in the email? Simply search for the email, click View Email and you can see how many times they opened that particular email and how many times they clicked on the links. No more time consuming back-and-forth with the customer, asking if they’ve received an email or not. With the free plugin, there is no open or click tracking reports.
Health reports delivered daily to a custom recipient list
The email sending health report in WP Offload SES Lite keeps you informed of the health of your email sending, giving you confidence about your site emails. WP Offload SES takes this a step further, giving you a snapshot of your engagement metrics (open and click counts) and allowing you to retry sending failures from your inbox. You also have the option to receive a health report daily in addition to the weekly and monthly options, and you can define a custom list of recipients to receive the report as an alternative to sending to all Administrator users.
Work talk: WP Offload SES from @dliciousbrains is slick as hell.
Brian J. Link
@bjplink
Quick Compare
| Free | Upgrade | |
|---|---|---|
Setup wizard |
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Open & click tracking |
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Verify senders from your WordPress dashboard |
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Multisite compatible |
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Email support |
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Open & click reporting |
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Auto-retry email sending failures |
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Manually retry email sending failures |
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Manually resend any sent emails |
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Search for any email |
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View a specific email |
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Analyze engagement for a specific email |
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Health reports delivered daily to a custom recipient list |
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Lightweight email newsletter features (Coming Soon)Just what you need for simple email newsletter sending and nothing you don’t. No drag and drop email builder here. And certainly no marketing automation stuff. This will be dead simple email newsletter features. You’ll be able to create lists, import subscribers, send simple emails, and allow visitors to subscribe/unsubscribe. Want to customize the look and feel of the emails? You can always change things up with some tweaks to your site's theme files. |
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Handling bounces & complaints (Coming Soon)By default with SES, bounces and complaints are sent to you by email and that's all. There is no report in the AWS console of exactly which emails have bounced or received a complaint, nor is there a way to handle them. We're planning to show which emails have bounced as part of the WP Offload SES reports so you can clean up your email address list periodically. We also plan to have actions/filters you can hook into with code to automatically handle bounces and complaints. |
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Reputation monitoring (Coming Soon)The AWS console allows you to review statistics about your reputation and do some reputation management. We're planning to pull this data into your WordPress dashboard so you can manage it without needing to login to AWS. |
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Unsubscribe from site emails (Coming Soon)The ability for a user to unsubscribe from site emails is a significant feature missing from WordPress. For email addresses that have hard bounced for example, it doesn't make sense to continue sending them emails, so we can automatically unsubscribe them from future site emails. In the future you'll have the option to include an unsubscribe link in the footer of your site emails to satisfy your users' need to unsubscribe and better comply with ever-tightening privacy regulations. |