FAQ on MailPoet Performance

MailPoet does not slow down websites.

As your visitors fairly rarely interact directly with MailPoet when they are browsing your website, there is not much within MailPoet that could affect the speed of your website.

However, we take performance seriously and have built MailPoet in a way that does not slow down your website when emails are being sent.

MailPoet was designed for both small sites with only several subscribers as well as larger sites with tens of thousands of subscribers.

MailPoet creates about 30 database tables to store the email and its related information.

However, this is not a problem, as modern databases are capable of handling thousands of tables.

It will grow, but it will rarely bust your hosting plan’s limit, even on smaller plans.

Database usage will be highly dependent on your usage and will grow as your list grows over time.

MailPoet stores information about your subscribers, lists they belong to, emails sent to such subscribers, open, click and unsubscribe statistics, among other types of information. E.g. rare senders, sending only a few emails every month to a list of under 1,000 subscribers, may expect MailPoet to use upwards to 100-200MB of disk space.

Medium senders, sending a couple times a month to several tens of thousands of subscribers within a year or two may expect the database size to reach 2GB.

Large senders, sending multiple daily emails to over a hundred thousand subscribers may expect database sizes to grow to over 10GB within a year or two.

It may seem like a lot of data, but modern database systems are designed to handle many times more data than that in a performant way, and MailPoet has been designed to make use of such features to have little to no effect on your site’s speed.

Really fast.

In real world scenarios some have achieved sending rates of about 50,000 emails/hour, but the sending rate will depend on configuration. MailPoet is designed to match a variety of needs:

A. If you use MailPoet Sending Service, sending speed can reach up to 50,000 emails/hour.

B. If you use a 3rd party email delivery service to deliver your emails, you may choose to send up to 100 emails every 5 minutes (nearly 29,000 emails a day) or more.

C. If you would like to send emails with your hosting company, even though MailPoet would be capable of sending more emails, hosting companies recommend limiting sending speed to under 500 emails an hour (e.g. BlueHost’s recommended rate is 70 emails every 30 minutes, that’s 3360 emails per day). MailPoet can be configured to follow such limits. View list of daily email limits for common hosts.

It depends on how the plugin sends. With MailPoet, you choose how your emails are delivered:

– host (default on install)
– the MailPoet Sending Service
– SMTP
– Amazon SES
– Sendgrid

Regardless of your sending method, email deliverability has a combination of primary contributing factors:

– Does the recipient actually expect and want to receive the email?
– Historical reputation of the sender (e.g. your domain);
– Historical reputation of the email delivery method (e.g. the hosting company, MailPoet Sending Service, Amazon SES).

Points 1 and 2 you fully control as a list owner, and they would apply to all services used for email delivery.

Some smaller hosting companies may not sufficiently manage their reputation (e.g. by not addressing spam originating on their infrastructure, not react to being blacklisted) when issues are caused by other customers.

If the reputation is bad enough and you use your hosting company’s infrastructure to send emails, by association this may degrade deliverability for your emails as well.

As it is common to send emails with your hosting company, this is also why it is common to think that emails sent from WordPress tend to have poor deliverability.

Having said that, some hosting companies maintain good sender reputation, so you may still reliably use their services.

However, specialized email delivery services, like the MailPoet Sending Service, Amazon SES or others, actively manage their reputation.

Furthermore, they have the tools and the knowledge to help you diagnose and resolve any deliverability issues.

During years of operation starting 2012 we have not had any cases where MailPoet would be forbidden.

Some hosts may limit how many emails can be sent using the “With your host” MailPoet sending method, but you can choose to use the extra MailPoet email delivery service (free up to 500 subscribers), or send with a 3rd party sending method (e.g. Amazon SES) if you need to send more emails than your host’s limit.

MailPoet can use a server-side cron, but it is not strictly necessary.

By default MailPoet’s processing is done in the background without impacting the site’s speed to your visitors.

But if you prefer, MailPoet can be configured to use the server side cron instead.