After creating a website, the first thing every business owner needs is a professional email address with their business name in it.
A professional email address will help you win trust when dealing with other businesses and customers.
G Suite is Google’s productivity suite that allows you to use Gmail with your own professional email address. In this article, we will show you how to setup a professional custom branded email address with Gmail and G Suite.
What is a Professional Email Address?
A professional email address is the one that has your business name in it. For example, john@myphotostudio.com is a professional email address.
Email accounts on free email services like john.photographer@gmail.com are not good for business because they do not look professional. Your customers and other businesses will find a professional email address more trustworthy.
For a professional email address, you will need a domain name and a website. We have step by step guides on how to choose a domain name and how to quickly make a website.
If you already have a domain name and a website, then you are all set to have your own professional email address.
Why Use G Suite for Professional Branded Email Address?
You might be thinking why use G Suite when most WordPress hosting companies offer unlimited email accounts with your own domain name?
Email is one of the most important communication tool for business owners. If you miss an important email, then it can hurt your business.
Most web hosting email servers are unreliable, restrictive, isolated, and less secure. You wouldn’t even know if the email you sent was actually delivered.
This is where G Suite and Gmail comes in.
Gmail is the industry leader in email with 1.5 billion monthly active users. G Suite is Google’s productivity app suite for business owners which includes Gmail and is already used by over 4 million businesses and 80 million students / educators.
G Suite works with your own domain name, which allows you to use Gmail to create your professional branded email address.
Here are some of the benefits of using G Suite and Gmail for a professional email address:
- Professional business email address on your own domain.
- Gmail’s rock solid security and spam filters.
- 30 GB – Double the storage of a free Gmail Account.
- Manage email even when offline using Gmail app on mobile devices.
- Works anywhere web, mobile, tablet, you name it.
- Works great with Outlook and can even sync old Outlook accounts.
- Each user can have up to 30 email aliases.
- Use Google Calendar, Google Hangouts for chat, video, and voice calls on your own business email address.
- No advertisements and 24/7 professional support whenever you need help.
- Works seamlessly with your WordPress site.
- Most important of all, high deliverability, no delays, no ending up in spam folder.
Now that you know why using G Suite for professional emails is important, let’s take a look at how to set up a branded professional email address with G Suite.
Editor’s Note: We use G Suite for all of our professional email addresses and can honestly say it’s the best.
Setting up a Professional Email Address with Gmail (G Suite)
First you will need to signup for a G Suite account.
It costs around $5/month for each user. If you pay annually, then you get 2 months free ($50/year per user).
G Suite also offers a free 14-day trial, which allows you to test drive everything before you make up your mind. Basically its all the powerful features you’re used to of Gmail, Drive, Calendar, etc (but now it’s for your business).
Simply visit the G Suite website and click on the Get Started button for the plan you want to use.
Next, you need to enter your business name, the number of employees, and the country where you are located. You can choose just yourself for 1 user account, or choose the number of employees.
Click on the next button to continue.
On the next step, you will be asked to enter your personal contact information including name and email address.
After that, you will be asked to choose a domain name. If you already have a domain name, then click on ‘Yes I have one I can use’. Otherwise, click on ‘No, I need one’ to register a domain name.
If you need to register a new domain name, then you will be charged separately for registering a new domain name (tip: here’s how to register a domain name for free).
If you are using an existing domain name, then you will need to verify ownership of the domain name. We’ll show you how to do that later in this article.
In the next step, you will be asked to create your G Suite user account by entering a username and password.
This username will also be your first professional email address, so you need to choose a username that you want to use as your professional email address.
You have successfully created your G Suite account. You can now click on the ‘Go to Setup’ button
On the setup screen, you will be asked to add more people to your account. If you want to create more accounts for your employees or departments, then you can do that here.
You can also just click on ‘I have added all user email addresses’ and click on the next button.
Remember, you can always add more users to your account and create their email addresses later when needed.
If you registered your domain name elsewhere, then you will now be asked to verify your ownership of the domain name.
After that you will see a HTML code snippet that you need to add to your website.
There are other ways to verify your website ownership as well. You can upload a HTML file to your website using an FTP client or file manager app in your hosting account dashboard.
If you don’t have a website, then you can use also use the MX Record method. You will see step by step instructions to do that once you choose this method.
For the sake of this tutorial, we are assuming that you already have a WordPress blog, and we will show you how to add the verification HTML code snippet in WordPress.
Switch to the WordPress admin area in a new browser tab to install and activate the Insert Headers and Footer plugin. For more details, see our step by step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.
Upon activation, go to Settings » Insert Headers and Footer page and paste the HTML code you copied from G Suite under the ‘Scripts in Header’ section.
Don’t forget to click on the ‘Save’ button to store your settings.
Now switch back to your G Suite setup screen and click on the checkbox that says ‘I added the meta tag to my homepage’.
Next, you will be asked to enter MX record entries for your domain name.
Note: You only need to add MX records if you have an existing domain name and website. Users who registered their domain names via Google, don’t need to add MX records.
Since your domain name is not registered with Google, your emails will reach your domain name, but not to the Google servers.
You will need to set up the right MX records on your domain name settings, so Google’s servers can send and receive emails for your business.
To do that, you will need to login to your web hosting account, or your domain registrars account.
We will show you how to add MX records in Bluehost, but the basic concept is the same on all hosts and domain registrars. Basically, you will be looking for DNS settings under your domain name.
Login to your Bluehost hosting dashboard and click on ‘Domains’. On the next page, select your domain name and then click on the ‘Manage’ link next to DNS Zone Editor option.
Bluehost will now open your DNS zone editor. You need to switch back to your G Suite setup screen and check the box that says ‘I have opened the control panel of my domain name’.
It will now show you the MX records that you need to enter. You will also see a link to the documentation which shows you how to add these records to dozens of hosting and domain services provider.
Here is how you will add this information to your Bluehost DNS settings:
Click on ‘Add Record’ button to save it. After that, repeat the process to add all five lines as MX records.
Once you are finished, switch back to G Suite setup and check the box next to ‘I created the new MX records’.
You will be asked to delete any existing MX records still pointing to your website hosting or domain name registrar.
To do this, you need to switch back to your DNS zone editor and scroll down to the MX records section. You will see the MX records you created earlier along with an older MX record still pointing to your website.
Click on the delete button next to the old MX record to delete it.
After that, switch back to the G Suite setup screen and check the box that says ‘I deleted existing MX records’.
You will now be asked to save your MX records. For some providers, once you add MX records they are already saved, for others you may need to manually save MX records.
Once you have saved MX records, check the box that says ‘I have saved MX records’ in G Suite setup.
After that, you need to click on ‘Verify domain and setup email’ button to exit the setup wizard.
Using Your Professional Email with G Suite and Gmail
Your email account works like any other Gmail account. You can access it by visiting Gmail Website and sign in with your email address, e.g. john@yourdomain.com.
You can also manage your G Suite account by visiting the admin console.
This is where you can add/remove new users to your domain name. Each of your users will have 30 GB storage and all the same features, but they will not have access to the admin console. You can remove those users at any time you want.
Troubleshooting G Suite Domain Setup
It is likely that your web host may not be using a dashboard like we have shown in the screenshots above.
G Suite has detailed documentation for many of the popular web hosting and domain registration service providers. Visit, set up MX records (Hosts specific steps) page and then locate your domain registrar or web host from the list.
If you do not find your service provider in the list, then you can ask them directly to help you setup G Suite for your domain name.
We hope this article helped you setup a professional email address with G Suite and Gmail. You may also want to see our list of 19+ free Google tools every WordPress blogger should use.
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I use G-suite for my Domain mail routing in exactly this way. I set it up a couple of years ago when I was looking to give a more professional appearance but primarily to increase deliverability. Less warnings to recipients about “Sever could not verify your-domain.com was the actual sender”
I have a G-suite account where I am the only user. But it does allow you to add any other Domains you happen to own. When you do this , you then get to set up MX records for each of those additional domains and Google then serves the mail. At this point you add the extra domains as part of the primary G-suite Domain Organization. I have google routed mail addresses for each one of those dot coms and Google verifies the secure layer. And yes i do Use WP MAIL SMTP plugin on each of those sites also. All of this and 30GB storage on Drive for AU$5 a month. I am about to up the ante and go the next level at $10 per month which gives me additional function but primarily the 1TB – Unlimited storage on Drive.
Thanks for sharing your reasons for using G-suite for your domain for others looking
How many emails can be sent using g suite basic? Can we use it as email marketing to large client-base?
Rather than using g suite, we would recommend some of the services here for email marketing: https://www.wpbeginner.com/showcase/best-email-marketing-services/
Are there any places that do business emails for say, 16 total different dot com business domains that I already have? Who would those be if so, please? Also, do any of these paid services have monthly billing options, or are they all annual subscription billing only? I’d really be interested if anyone knew of any free sites that allow you a business email dot com for your current domain names, again, I need about 16 different email dot coms on it and am on a fixed income searching for the lowest price or at least a low monthly fee rather than having to pay a whole year up front. Thank you!
You may want to check with your hosting/domain provider if they offer something like that where you could forward the emails without the concern with billing.
Beware of using google for your business. Someone hacked our account and google shut us down for “violating google policies”….
We can’t access any of our emails or any history or communication for our company. Everything we built is destroyed. THERE NOT EVEN AN EMAIL AT GOOGLE TO CONTACT… worst company we ever dealt with. Beware… this can happen to you!
If you are still having issues with your Google email, you may want to visit their support page with their contact information here: https://gsuite.google.com/support/
‘Scroll down and you will find MX Records. There would be one or more entries there. You need to delete all of them.’
I done this and now my website is down for 24-48 hours until the dns records propagate through the web. This deletes pointers to where your domain is held!
This isn’t true. MS records only effect your email and during the time it takes to propagate the original value still holds. So your email may continue to go wherever it had gone before for up to 2 days. (Almost all modern systems will update in a few hours.)
Thanks for sharing this information, I appreciate the article and decided to give Google Apps for Work a try because I’ve had many issues with the current email service I currently use for my business mail and also for my clients business mail as well as their website service provider.
Thank you for this tutorial. This was a very helpful post and helped me in setting up email for my new website.
Thank you for the tutorial. Your article are very helpful for beginner like me.
Thanks WPBeginner team!
This was a very helpful post and helped me in setting up email for my new website.
Tried and failed no easy task for most non tech savy small bus people like myself. I gave up.
Hi Nick,
We are sorry that you didn’t find the tutorial helpful. Please let us know where you are stuck and we’ll try to help.
I have a domain, but do not have a WordPress site . Can I set up the business email address?
Thanks
Hi zhou yanjun,
Yes you can. You will have to adjust your domain’s DNS settings.
We really need some FREE options. This article did not even address how to fix my non working, PHP email, or any free options.
You should also state that they cost at the beginning. Before I waste an hour of my time. I love the paid services, I just can not afford them
look at the above answer
I’ve had my gmail account since 2011. I didn’t sign up for (Google Apps at the time) G Suite back then. Can I be grandfathered into getting a free business email domain since I had a gmail account before the 2012 price implementation to upgrade?
Hi Cory,
Nope, we don’t think that would work. You can still ask on GSuite support forums for more information.
How can i maintain my email address
Why on earth do you hide yourself? Why make it so difficult to get in touch with you?
And, why do I not get my e-mails? And why do I get så many “failures” (mislykket)?
Why do you send me failure messages when I send to correct e-mail addresses?
I am fed up with you.
Perhaps time to find myself some other e-mail company?
Best regards
Ragnhild Margreth Nordlund
Hi Ragnhild,
If you are talking about Google Apps for work (also known as Guite), then they do have 24/7 dedicated email and phone support.
Would Google Apps for Work provide the same services as described in your “7 Best Email Marketing Services for Small Business (2016)” blog post using Constant Contact, AWeber, or MailChimp, etc.?
No google apps for work does not offer email newsletter service. It does give you a professional email address that you can use in combination with an email marketing service, so your emails look more professional
Hi, thank for your this detailed walk-through; only thing, (maybe I’m just slow/dunce; I did read through the entire article btw), but I’m unsure about this: if I sign up for business email with GSuite/Google apps and I respond to an email sent to the business email, the client will see the business email, right?
You see, I’m new to this owning your website business. I have a subdomain.wordpress.com website (I plan on upgrading to my own domain soon) and I know the upgraded WP offers business emails, but when I read the info. on the WP site, no where does it say that when I respond to a client’s message, that the client will see the business email; it looks like the client will see my own/non-business email.
Eg. Let’s say my business is wpbeginner and I upgraded to WP’s business plan and I selected the email: hello (at) wpbeginner to forward emails to my actual/non-business email: justanexample (a) gmail.
If a client hits the ‘contact’ button on my site and/or sends an email to hello (at) wpbeginner, when I reply, will the client see hello (at) wpbeginner or will the client see prettylady (a) gmail? That’s what I don’t understand.
I have this same question for Google apps.
I want to make sure I do the correct thing; if it is that the client will see my non-business email when I respond, then getting a WP business email doesn’t make sense.
But on Google apps, the client *will* see my *business* email when I respond, correct?
Thank you for clarifying.
Clients will see your business address when you reply to them.
Clarify pliz. Should i use support@example.com or eriab@example.com or both??
Hi Eriab,
It is totally up to you. You can use either or both.
There is nothing mentioned about WhoIs privacy. Is this option automatic or an extra cost?
You can purchase Domain Whois Privacy from your registrar.
When I get to the page “Open Google Cloud Account” I am taken to my main Google sign-in page. I put in passwords for account, it goes back to “Open GC Account”. I put in password that I just created for the account, still doesn’t work.
Pulling my hair out in Texas.
Can you advise?
Debbe
I have purchased an 30 days trial.
Now when I am trying for billing, it is automatically showing me this on
(HOW YOU PAY:
Automatic payments: Pay after your ads run. Your ads typically start running almost right after you submit billing details. You pay only after you accrue costs, via an automatic charge when you reach your billing threshold or 30 days after your last automatic payment, whichever comes first. Learn more
Manual payments: Pay before your ads run. Your ads typically start running after we process your first payment. We deduct charges from your prepaid balance each time your account accrues a cost. If your account runs out of funds, your ads stop running until you make another payment. Learn more)
Now, I just wanna purchase an Professional email not this Ad service account what should I do
Contact Google customer support from your account dashboard.
I believe you were routed to the AdWords page. As for the Apps payment, or Email payment, basic is like $3/user and also the payment can be automatic if you put a card. You can also deposit an amount minimum of $10.
I creat email account
What about adding addresses in a group in outlook?
How can it be achieved under this setup ?
Hi thanks for the tutorial! I ran into 1 hiccup though at the “verify your domain” step. Once I click the button to do so, I get a small gray popup that says “Server error”. What does that mean?
No explanation. I can’t click on it to get more details. when I click on the listed “help center” link under the google setup steps, I got a 403 error.
Is it because bluehost only lets us set min. TTL at 14400 and google asks for it to be 3600?
Can you please help…
Your domain may not be properly setup. Please contact BlueHost support, they will be able to help you troubleshoot,
Yet 6 days I’d tried to do it, but still unsuccessful. My new account not excist((
Nice article, Have one question , Some where I read that google will provide free user accounts like
, etc with main account, is it correct ? and what generic accounts it will provide as free user accounts?
Hi. I want to use a free custom email address for my website. How should I go about doing that? I am using Bluehost.
if i use 5 emails on my domain, which is used by 5 other people, then is it necessary that i have to take all the emails to google work email.
if yes, do i have to pay for all accounts seperately.
can i only take one email and rest will be used normally on outlook or integrated with free google account.
I didn’t know about the google app .I guess Good things do not come with free option. I am happy to use my professional email provided by my hosting. Maybe in future Will go for google app .
Hi – I appreciate the article and decided to give Google Apps for Work a try because I’ve had many issues with the current email service I currently use for my business mail and also for my clients business mail as well as their website service provider.
FYI: The only issue I have at this point is that the coupon code provided in this article was only valid for a single user (which I guess was first come firs served). I contacted Google who would not honor the 20% off offer.
Excellent step by step… I’m going to definitely save this…
So, to confirm… if I am the only one accessing the email… then other alias’ I set up, e.g. info@, sales@, etc., do not incur a charge as another user… correct?
How difficult to sync with Outlook… especially if you want updates to be global… and and Outlook uses folders and Google apps/gmail does not… any issues?
Finally… I’m building out my next site on a subdomain.domain.com right now… would I be able to go ahead and set up the email or should I wait until I migrate the site and turn on the search engine, etc.?
Christine
Christine, yes that is correct aliases do not incur charges as separate user. For Outlook you can use Google Apps Sync tool for Microsoft Outlook. You can also add your Google Apps account as an IMAP or POP account to your Outlook mail. If you have access to domain’s DNS records, then you can set it up.
Great tutorial as usual! You guys truly do the heavy lifting and it’s all very helpful. Thanks!
As always, thanks for the awesome tutorial. Always wanted to do this to use our own domain for emails, but never had the time to research. Now i don’t have to research, you already have the info i need here for new email addresses, thanks!
I just have one question, what happens to my old/existing email addresses using my domain? How do i migrate them?
If you are the only person using those email addresses then you can add them as email aliases. If other users use those email addresses, then you will need to add them as users in Google Apps Admin Console.
Got it, thanks!
Thank you for this tutorial. When I add aliases, do they have to be al @yourdomain.com or can they be totally different? I have a few different websites and would rather not have a separate Google Apps for Work account (& fee) for each. Thanks again!
They have added multiple domain support to Google Apps, but there are A LOT of restrictions and issues associated with it.
And what really sucks is those of us with legacy accounts can’t add multiple domains. So much for the early adoption bonus.
I have created a Google Apps Work account (example.com) and have 5 users … one is my son shane@example.com … he has a youtube business and has used a free gmail account for this business for a few years username@gmail.com … I thought that I could simply add username@gmail.com as a send from and send to account so that Shane can stay logged into his shane@example.com email and view ALL emails coming in from shane@example.com and username@gmail.com …. this seems like it would be a VERY common requirement but I cannot get it to work!! Ironically, I have no problem adding a NON gmail account as a send from and send to account. Does ANYONE know how to set this up using a Google Apps Work account and adding a free gmail account?
Instead of change Send From and Reply to fields, you can also setup forwarding. Open the Google Apps email account and go to Settings -> Forwarding and add the gmail address. Similarly you can setup forwarding on free gmail account to forward all mail to the Google Apps account.
amazing Guide and rich info, just wondering if you can suggest a free one until i can afford to buy from google thanks said
I agree
Yes, thank you for the article… However a very important aspect has been left out I think.
Setting up the MX record in the actual domain handler.. This is a crucial piece of the puzzle, this way you can have complete control over the email and there is no connection to the webhost.
They way to do it is to temporarily park the domain so you can access the DNS manager inside:
1. Park domain – i.e. with godaddy just put the default NS records or “set to default”
2. Go to the DNS file zone editor and post the host to your webhost IP
3. And now add the mail exchanger info
So this way I think your email address with google aps is 100% independent.
Or this is not the way to do this? Please confirm.
Yes, this is correct and we have mentioned it in the article above. You need to delete existing MX entries from your domain and add Google MX records.
I use Google apps for my business email and it works flawlessly.