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.
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