Elementor Contact Form DB: Save, View & Display For FREE!

In this article, you will learn how to collect and access your Elementor Form submission data. You can also export Elementor Form submissions database to CSV, automatically export data to email marketing tool and display submissions in the WordPress frontend pages and posts.

When you have forms on your Elementor pages you would want to backup your form submissions data, and access it later, using good form submissions management.

Saving  Elementor Form submissions data allows you to use this data later in any way you want such as creating a marketing campaign, creating a report from the feedback / survey, and many more uses.

How To Save Elementor Form Submission Data To Database

Before we see how to save the Elementor form submission, we need to first create a form in Elementor. You can skip this step if you’ve already created an Elementor page with an Elementor Form widget.

• Go to the page you want to add the form or add a new page and click “Edit with Elementor”
• In the Elementor editor page, search “form” and add the Elementor Form widget to the page
  
• Give the form a suitable name. We will later use this name to store the form.
• Then add the necessary fields to your form and then Update / Publish the Elementor page

Next, we will have to install an Elementor add-on to save the Elementor Form submissions. In this article, we will use Tablesome, a free Elementor Contact Form DB plugin.

Tablesome allows you to save Elementor Pro Form submissions into DB (database) and can see all the submissions in tabular format.

Not only can you save the form submissions, but you can also edit & delete the entries, export entries to CSV & XLSX files and display them on WP posts & pages on the frontend.

You can download and try the free Tablesome plugin here.

Install and Activate Tablesome

Tablesome is a free plugin available in the WordPress repository.

• Go to your WordPress admin dashboard and then click Plugins → Add New
• Here search for “Tablesome” and then install and activate the Tablesome plugin
• After activating the Tablesome your Elementor Form submissions will be automatically saved to Tablesome tables
• After a form is submitted, in the dashboard go to Tablesome → All Tables
• Here a new table would be created and if you open the table, you can observe that your form entry would be saved

Tablesome by default saves all the form submissions from every Elementor Form page (if you have multiple forms). If you want to save the form submissions only from certain Elementor Form pages, you have to set up a workflow.

Elementor Forms to Mailchimp Tutorial

How To Include Only Specific Forms To Be Saved To The Database?

• To do this, go to Tablesome → Tablesome Settings → Forms
• Here you could see that the “Store all Forms Entries” option is enabled
  
• When you disable this option, the automatic saving of all forms will be stopped and you will have setup Tablesome form automation for every Elementor form that you create
• Disable the “Store all Forms Entries” option and then set up the Tablesome table form automation
• To setup saving specific forms go to Tablesome → Create New Table
• On the Create New Table page give the table a suitable title like the name of the form that you want to save
• Move to the Triggers & Actions toolbar, where you have to add the Elementor Form Trigger
• You can see that in the Actions toolbar, there is a Trigger 1 section select “Elementor” in the integrations field
• Next, you have to add “On Forms Submit” in the Types of Actions field and select the Elementor Form that you want to save in the Forms field.
  
• Then in the Actions select ‘Tablesome’ in the Integrations fields and then select the ‘Add Row’ in Actions
• You can see that all of the Elementor Form fields will be automatically recognised and selected to be saved when the “Auto-detect additional form fields” option is set by default.
• The table’s columns are automatically formed depending on the form fields when the first form is submitted, and the submissions are saved.
• You also have the choice to save only particular fields from your form by selecting the option “Manually Match Some Fields.”
• If you like, you can select this option and manually match a certain column.
• Your Elementor Form submissions will then be saved to this table after you click “Save Table” to save the table.
• When you’re finished, submit a test form to check whether it correctly saves to the table.

Viewing Elementor Form Database

• You can view the Elementor Form submissions by going to Tablesome → All Tables → Select the form database table. 
• Here you can see that your form submissions are neatly displayed in the table. You can easily Search, Sort, and Filter the form entries.
• When you have a large set of form submissions these table options would be very useful.
• Not only can you view the submissions, but you can also ‘Edit’ which is a unique option provided by Tablesome.

Displaying Elementor Form Submissions

• In the Tablesome Form submission table, you could see that there is a table shortcode being displayed near the table title.

• You can copy and paste the Tablesome shortcode to the Elementor page where you want to display the table with the Elementor Form submission database.
• You can customize the table layout and change the table style by going to Tablesome → Tablesome Settings

Exporting Saved Elementor Form Database

You can automatically export the Elementor Form submissions to the Mailchimp email marketing tool. To export submissions to Mailchimp you have to set up a second action. See this tutorial to set up Elementor Mailchimp integration using Tablesome.

You could also manually export the Elementor Form submissions as CSV and XLSX file formats. by clicking the “Export Table” button above your database table.

Saving Form Submissions Using Elementor Collections Feature

Elementor Pro plugin does come with an Elementor collect submissions feature that is a part of the ‘Elementor Form Actions After Submit’ option. Though we don’t recommend that you use this feature, we will see how to use the Elementor collect submissions feature to save the Elementor form to the database.

• Go to the page where you want to add the Elementor Form and add the form using the Elementor Form widget.
  
• In the Elementor Form widget, you can find the “Actions After Submit” section. In the section, you can add actions that will be performed after a user submits the form. Here there are several options such as Popup, Redirect, etc.,
• The Collect Submissions and Email options will be selected by default. You can also choose other options that you want to happen after the form is submitted.

To view, the submissions database go to your WordPress dashboard, then go to Elementor → Submissions

On this submissions page, all of the form submissions from every Elementor form you have would be listed. You can click the specific submissions and see the details of the form submission.

Why use Tablesome instead of Elementor Collections for Form Submissions?

Since Elementor Pro comes with a default Form Collections option, you might be wondering why you have to use Tablesome to save the form submission. Tablesome is better than Elementor collections and here is why:

No Option To Import: 

If you are migrating from an old site to a new site, Elementor Form submissions cannot migrate because Elementor Form submissions do not have any options to import. Suppose if you have a previous form entries database with another plugin, you cannot add it to the Elementor database.

No Conditions For API Export:

When connected to an external tool via API, you may not want to send every form submission. For the values to be sent via API, you may want to apply some conditions such as ‘true’ or ‘false’.

Problems With Export:

Some users have complained that when they export the data, some of it is not properly exported.

Cannot Stop Duplicate Submissions & Spammers:

In the collections, you could get many duplicate submissions and possibly thousands of spam form submissions. There are no ways to stop this.

Cannot Display On Frontend

If you want to display the form submissions on the WordPress frontend, there are no options. You have to manually export it to a CSV file and then use another tool to display it on the WordPress pages and posts.

Limited 3rd-Party Connections

Elementor does have some 3rd-party tools such as some email marketing services but some important and useful integrations are missing such as Google Sheets, Salesforce, Zapier, Notion, etc.,

So Tablesome is much better than Elementor Collections in so many ways and the coolest thing is that it’s Free!

So do use Tablesome to collect Elementor Form submissions to the database.