How to Check Forms in the Backend of WordPress

Gravity Forms can be a great tool for getting feedback from your users about your website, company and more. WordPress normally sends you form entries in a nice, neat email for convenient viewing. However, this feature occasionally breaks. Sometimes, these emails get caught in your spam folder, your IP address gets blacklisted or maybe they were never sent via email in the first place. This is why we recommend testing the forms on your website to be sure your responses are being delivered to the email address where you want to receive notifications.

We don’t recommend depending on email notifications alone. You should regularly check the backend of your site. Ideally, you should do this once a week (or more often if your forms are critical to the way you do business), to be sure you’ve seen your form responses. We don’t recommend that you depend on email notifications alone, because while Infomedia can stand behind the performance of forms on your website, we can’t ensure delivery of form responses to email.

We do run form delivery tests, but since we don’t have access to your email and don’t control your email client (Gmail, Outlook, etc.), we can’t know if you’ve gotten a response. As email security gets stronger, it’s a lot more common for form responses coming from your WordPress site to get blocked for various reasons — from the email being inaccurately flagged as spam to the user IP being blacklisted to the user not confirming their email address in the initial test email. We can only control how our sites perform; we don’t have control over your email client. Even if you get email through Infomedia, certain features are controlled by Gmail and by you, not by us.

Here’s how you can manually check the form entries on your WordPress Dashboard:

Choose a form on your site, fill it out and then submit it. It’s a good idea to add the word “Test” somewhere in the subject or elsewhere on the form so that anyone who gets the response knows why they’re getting the form submission. Once you submit the form, please check the email address that should be receiving notifications in order to be sure you’re receiving them. If there are others who should be receiving notifications from your website forms, please get in touch with them and confirm that they’re getting the form responses as well. Be sure to repeat this process for each form on your website.

To check that the backend of WordPress is receiving the submissions, just click the “Forms” tab in the sidebar of your site. You’ll see a list of all your forms there.

When you hover over the name of the form, you’ll see “Entries” as an option. Click the number underneath “Entries” next to the form you want to check, and you’ll see a list of all your form entries. 

This view shows all of the information in the form. In this case, a name, company name, website URL, email and a couple of comment boxes. You can search and organize the list in the upper right corner to look for specific entries.