How to search Gravity Forms entries

First decide whether you need to find submissions yourself in wp-admin, or let visitors search entries on a website page. Gravity Forms includes an Entries screen for internal use, but it does not provide a built-in public entry display, search box or Gutenberg block.

Keep private submissions in the admin unless you have a clear reason to expose them. A front-end search also needs access rules, pagination and protection against revealing fields that should remain private.

In WordPress, go to Forms and open the form whose submissions you need to search. Open its Entries screen, then use the entry list to browse submissions, sort the list and open individual records. The form selector lets you change which form is being viewed.

Use the filter toolbar for statuses such as All, Unread, Starred, Spam and Trash. If you cannot see a submission, check these filters before assuming it was deleted.

Use the search control on the Entries page to enter a name, email address, reference number or other value. Built-in searches are tied to the form currently selected, so repeat the search on other forms when the same person may have submitted more than one form.

For a large list, show useful fields as columns and search by a value that is stored consistently. A common Friday-afternoon mistake is searching for a formatted phone number or name that was saved differently from the value being entered.

If the normal entry list is not precise enough, a developer can modify its criteria with the gform_search_criteria_entry_list filter. Gravity Forms supports field filters, date ranges, status values, scalar operators such as contains, and a free-form search across field values.

Place the code in a custom functions plugin or a code snippets plugin rather than editing a parent theme. Test field IDs carefully, especially for names, checkboxes and list fields: checkbox input IDs can stop matching after fields are reordered.

For a public search page, custom PHP can retrieve entries with GFAPI::get_entries(), or a secured application can use the Gravity Forms REST API. You must create the search form, query handling, results template, pagination, access control and output escaping yourself. The REST API requires the gravityforms_view_entries capability for entry retrieval, and its search requests support field filters and paging.

This route is reasonable for a developer with unusual requirements, but it is not a quick setting. Do not return every field by default, do not expose private entries to logged-out visitors, and always limit the number of records returned to avoid slow or timing-out requests.

If visitors need to search and filter Gravity Forms submissions in a directory, member listing or customer portal, use a dedicated entry-search plugin instead of building the display layer yourself. Gravity Search is the supplied option for this job: it is designed to turn Gravity Forms submissions into searchable front-end content with configurable filters.

The manual admin route is fine when only your staff need to find entries. Choose the plugin route when visitors need a finished search interface, multiple filters or a controlled portal without maintaining custom PHP.