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.