Most business websites treat the notification email as the only copy of an enquiry. It arrives, someone reads it or does not, and if it was filed under spam or deleted by mistake, that customer is gone without a trace. Nobody notices until a person phones to ask why they never heard back.
The remedy is small. You can save form entries in WordPress itself, so every submission is kept on the site as well as emailed. This post explains how to check whether your form already does it, how to turn it on for the common plugins, and how to handle the personal data you are now keeping.
Why the email alone is a weak record
An email notification can fail in several quiet ways:
- The site’s mail does not leave the server, or the receiving mailbox rejects it.
- It lands in a spam or promotions folder and is cleared automatically.
- It goes to a mailbox belonging to someone who has left.
- Someone deletes it while clearing the inbox, before anyone replied.
With a stored copy, every one of those becomes a delay rather than a lost customer. You can look at the entries list, see who wrote, and reply late with an apology. A stored copy also lets you tell the difference between “the form is broken” and “the email is broken”, which is the first question to answer when a form stops delivering enquiries.
Check whether your form already keeps entries
Look at the left menu of your dashboard. Most form plugins that store submissions add an Entries screen under their own menu, for example under WPForms, Fluent Forms or Gravity Forms. Elementor Pro’s form widget, in recent versions, keeps submissions on a Submissions screen under the Elementor menu.
Open the screen and look for your most recent test or real submission. If it is there, storage is already on. If the screen shows an upgrade notice or is empty while emails are arriving, entries are not being kept.
Contact Form 7 has no entries screen at all. It sends the email and keeps nothing, by design.
How to save form entries in WordPress with Contact Form 7
The standard companion is Flamingo, a free plugin by the same developer as Contact Form 7.
- Back up the site first. Then search for Flamingo under Plugins → Add New Plugin, install it and activate it.
- A new Flamingo menu appears in the dashboard. There is nothing to configure for basic use.
- Submit a test through your form.
- Open Flamingo → Inbound Messages. Your test should be at the top, with the fields you filled in.
Flamingo only keeps submissions made after it was activated. Earlier enquiries exist only in whatever inbox received them. It also keeps an address book of people who have contacted you, which you may or may not want, and it is worth knowing it is there.
If your form accepts files, note that Contact Form 7 attaches them to the email and does not keep them on the site afterwards, so the stored entry has the text but not the file. Our guide to accepting customer files through a form covers plugins that handle files differently.
Other plugins that store contact form submissions
Here is how the other well-known form plugins handle storage:
- Fluent Forms keeps entries in the dashboard, where you can open each submission and see every field.
- Gravity Forms keeps entries as a core feature and lets you add notes, star and mark entries as read.
- WPForms has an entries screen; check whether the version you use includes viewing and exporting them, because this is one of the areas its paid versions cover.
The trade-offs between the two most common plugins are set out in our comparison of Contact Form 7 and WPForms. Do not install a second form plugin just to get storage. Flamingo or a change of plugin are better than running two.
Exporting your entries
Stored entries are only useful if you can get them out. Most plugins that keep entries offer an export to a CSV file from the entries screen, which opens in Excel, Google Sheets or Numbers. Flamingo can export too; look for the option on its Inbound Messages screen.
Export when you want to follow up a batch of leads, hand records to a colleague or keep an archive before deleting old entries from the site. If you want each new submission to appear in a spreadsheet automatically, that is a different setup, explained in our post on sending form entries to Google Sheets.
Treat an exported file with the same care as the entries themselves. A CSV of names, phone numbers and messages left in a shared folder or a downloads directory is easy to forget about.
Personal data: who sees it and how long you keep it
Once you store entries, your website holds personal data: names, emails, phone numbers and whatever people wrote. A few decisions keep that manageable.
Who can see the entries
In most plugins, administrators can see all entries. Some plugins let you give other roles access, or keep them hidden from editors. Check who on your site has an administrator account and whether they all need it. Our explanation of what each WordPress user role can do helps with that review.
How long to keep them
Keep entries for as long as you have a reason to, such as following up, answering a dispute or keeping a record of a quote, and no longer. Pick a period that fits your business, write it down, and delete older entries on that schedule. Some plugins can delete old entries automatically, so check yours before doing it by hand. Spam entries can usually be emptied far sooner.
Requests from customers
If someone asks what you hold about them, or asks for it to be deleted, you need to find their entries. WordPress has Export Personal Data and Erase Personal Data tools under the Tools menu, and some form plugins connect to them. If yours does not, search the entries screen by email address. For businesses serving customers in India, our note on form consent under India’s data law covers what to tell people when they submit.
Backups hold entries too
Entries live in the WordPress database, so every database backup contains them. Keep backups somewhere secure, and remember that deleting an entry from the site does not remove it from older backups straight away.
Mistakes to avoid
- Turning storage on and never looking at it. Glance at the entries list once a week and compare it with what arrived by email.
- Collecting things you should not keep on a website at all, such as card numbers, passwords or identity document numbers.
- Keeping thousands of spam entries for years.
- Removing the form plugin without exporting the entries first. Some plugins delete their data when uninstalled.
Storing entries is one of the safeguards in our guide to forms for business websites. For the wider set of habits, see our WordPress owner’s guide.
Frequently asked questions
Can I recover form submissions from before I turned on storage?
Not from the form plugin. If entries were never saved, the only copies are the notification emails, wherever they arrived. Search those inboxes, including spam and the mailboxes of anyone who received copies. If you use an SMTP plugin with an email log, that log may show who wrote, depending on what it records.
Could someone read the stored entries if the site were hacked?
Yes, potentially. Entries sit in the database, so anyone who gains administrator access or reaches the database can read them. That is a good reason to keep only the entries you need, delete old ones on a schedule, and make sure every admin account has a strong password and two-factor login.
Can staff without admin access read the entries?
It depends on the plugin. Some only show entries to administrators, while others have permission settings or work with role plugins so you can let an editor or a custom role see them. Test by logging in as that user before assuming they can or cannot see the data.
Should I still keep the email notifications once entries are stored?
Yes. Email is how you hear about a new enquiry quickly, and the stored entry is the safety copy. Keeping both means a failed email does not lose the lead, and a problem with the site does not stop you reading new messages as they come in.
Entries are only as safe as the site and backups around them. Our WordPress monthly maintenance plan handles that background work: updates applied with care, backups stored away from the server, security watched and the site kept running.
Next in this series: How to Set Up a Form Auto-Reply Email in WordPress
