How to save Contact form 7 entries to the DB

Learn how to save Contact form 7 entries to the database. Contact form 7 is an amazing WordPress contact form plugin, very reliable and easy to use, without unnecessary bloat and options you most likely won’t need. I use it for all of my WP based projects.

One of my clients asked for a feature to have all of the contact form entries stored and available through the WordPress dashboard. This is a full feature list that my solution was supposed to have:

  • choose/filter submissions by the post/page they were submitted from and date range at the same time
  • export by the post/page submitted from
  • export CSV, PDF, print

Before trying to code my own solution from scratch, I decided to check what is available out there in the official WP plugin repository that hopefully ticked most of the boxes above. Here are the results of my research:

CFDB7

pros:

  • dedicated DB table
  • CSV export
  • sortable by date

cons:

  • can’t exclude forms
  • can’t manage form submissions

Save Contact Form 7

pros:

  • print, to pdf, csv export
  • each form to its own DB table

cons:

  • can’t manage forms
  • can’t exclude forms
  • no sorting options, not even by date

Contact Form Submissions

pros:

  • CSV export
  • date filtering and sorting

cons:

  • poor overview screen, lacks info
  • can’t manage forms
  • can’t exclude forms
  • saves forms to wp_posts table

Contact Form 7 Database + | CFDB+

pros:

  • CSV, xls export
  • change status (Todo, Done)
  • page sent from
  • search by status, page
  • sort by all columns
  • filter by date
  • own DB table for form submissions

cons:

  • cant filter by page and date combined

Contact Form Entries

pros:

  • CSV export, print, print with notices
  • editable form data, possibility to add notes and email sender directly
  • starring
  • filter by each field including page source and combined with date range
  • sortable fields
  • separate DB tables

Conclusion

Turns out there a quite a few solutions for storing contact form submissions into WordPress DB, and not just exclusively for Contact form 7 plugin. Many contact form plugins are supported by few of the plugins I tried. But for me, clear winner is the last plugin on this list – Contact Form Entries plugin – which basically had everything I needed.

1 thought on “How to save Contact form 7 entries to the DB”

  1. Dear author,
    how can be last name and first name exported from contact form 7 to Contact Form Entries CRM Entries you recommend?

    Thank you very much in advance!

    Best regards,
    Natalie

    Reply

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