PHPMailer Hangs on Send
Hijacking the post to say i had the same issue but had set the port to 465 without setting SMTPSecure to 'ssl' in the example its set TLS by default
sadly this probably won't ever help anyone else who has this same problem, but I was able to get everything working by just changing the port to 465.
Eventually found solution for my configuration.
Just add ssl:// to smtp.google.com $mail->Host = 'ssl://smtp.gmail.com';