WordPress offers various free and paid contact form plugins. Among the free plugins, Contact Form 7 and WPForms Lite are widely used for creating simple inquiry forms. Although neither CF7 nor WPForms Lite has the feature to save user-submitted data to a database (DB), users can use add-on plugins to save input content to the database.
How to Save WPForms Lite Entries to a Database (DB) in WordPress
Recently, more cases have emerged where themes or page builders provide inquiry form functions. For example, if using Elementor Pro, users can create a contact form using the Form widget. The best-selling theme, Avada Theme, also provides inquiry form functionality.
Avada Forms and Elementor's Form widget provide the ability to send user-submitted input via email and store it in the DB.
With WPForms, users can only store data in the DB with the WPForms Pro version, but they can use an add-on plugin called Database Addon For WPForms (wpforms entries) - WPFormsDB to save user-submitted data to the DB and view it on the admin page (dashboard), which is highly rated by users.
Users can install this plugin by searching for "WPFormsDB" in WordPress Admin » Plugins » Add New. Once installed, no additional setup is necessary.
When a visitor submits a WPForms contact form on the site, it is sent via email and also stored in the DB, which can be viewed on the dashboard. Since email delivery can be incomplete, storing data in the DB as a backup can prevent missing customer inquiries.
To view user-submitted data, users can click "WPForms" on the WordPress dashboard. Then, the inquiry form list is displayed, along with the count (number of inquiry submissions) for each inquiry form.
To view the input data, users can click the inquiry form name in the "Name" field.
There are no additional options for displaying specific fields, so all field contents are displayed. If there are many input fields, some columns may be displayed vertically, making it difficult to view. In that case, users can click the Export CSV button to export the data to a CSV file and view it in Excel or other programs.
Features of this plugin include:
- No configuration required
- All forms saved to a single database table (DB table)
- Easy-to-use and lightweight plugin
- Developer-friendly and easy to customize
Note that the premium contact form plugin, Quform, also provides an option to save data to the DB. In Quform, it is also possible to save data to a user-defined DB table.
Conclusion
In summary, we have looked at WordPress plugins that save data submitted through inquiry forms created with the free contact form plugin, WPForms Lite, to the DB. With plugins like WPFormsDB, users can save user-submitted data to the DB without any coding work and view inquiry content on the dashboard.
However, it is important to note that using such plugins can affect site speed and may conflict with other plugins. Nonetheless, WPFormsDB is introduced as a lightweight plugin, so its impact on site speed is likely to be limited.