Gravity Forms Partial Entries is Not What You Think

Last updated January 27th, 2025 at 10:34 pm

Gravity Forms Partial Entries is not what you think.

The Gravity Forms Partial Entries addon does not do what you may think it does.

You may think you can use Partial Entries along with the Gravity Forms Save and Continue feature as a way to automatically save data users enter on multi-page forms when those users neglect to hit the Save and Continue button. Not so.

(Skip the background and check out a solution.)

So what’s Partial Entries for?

The Partial Entries addon allows authorized users to inspect partial (“abandoned”) form submissions from the dashboard (Forms > Entries). It seems there are two primary purposes:

1. Diagnostic: to find clues as to why people aren’t filling out your forms
2. Sales/Marketing: (taken from the Gravity Forms website:) “helping you to recover the details of potential leads and future customers”

Gravity Forms documentation also emphasises that partial entries (which are strored in the gf_entry_meta database table) are not linked to saved entries (which are stored in the gf_draft_submissions database table). And they issue this warning:

Warning: Editing partial entries is not recommended when the form is also using Save and Continue. Partial entries and draft submissions (Save and Continue) are not synchronized, so any changes made to a partial entry could be lost if the user resumes the draft submission.

Try this solution, from GravityWiz

If you want to force Gravity Forms to automatically save progress, you should look at Gravity Forms Advanced Save and Continue, one of the perks from GravityWiz. (I haven’t checked it out yet, but I intend to presently.)

If you have experience with this issue, I’d like to hear from you in the comments below.