How to prevent Gravity Forms entries from being stored

Gravity Forms needs to create an entry so it can process notifications and add-on feeds. The practical choice is between delayed cleanup and deletion immediately after processing.

Use the built-in retention policy if keeping an entry for at least one day is acceptable. Use custom code or an add-on if the entry must disappear during the submission process.

For delayed deletion, open the form in the WordPress dashboard and go to Settings then Personal Data. Under Retention Policy, choose whether entries should be moved to the trash or permanently deleted, then set the number of days and save.

The minimum is one day, and cleanup runs through a daily WordPress cron task. This also applies to partial Save & Continue submissions. It is a good manual route when a short retention period is acceptable, but it is not immediate and an entry may remain for up to about 24 hours after it becomes eligible.

For immediate cleanup without another plugin, add the following to a custom functionality plugin, a snippets plugin, or the active theme’s functions.php. Replace 1 with the form ID, or use the unsuffixed action if it should apply to every form.

add_action( 'gform_after_submission_1', 'remove_form_entry' ); function remove_form_entry( $entry ) { GFAPI::delete_entry( $entry['id'] ); }

This waits until the entry has been recorded and the normal submission hook runs, then deletes it. The drawback is that it is your responsibility to maintain the code and check that every integration has finished before deletion.

Submit a test entry and confirm that notifications, CRM feeds, webhooks, user registration, and any file handling complete before the entry disappears. Deleting an entry can also remove associated uploaded files, so do not use this approach if those files still need to be available unless you deliberately change the file-deletion behaviour.

Be especially careful with asynchronous feeds. A background feed may run after the submission request, so deleting the entry immediately can leave that integration without the data it needs. Disable asynchronous processing for the affected feed or delay deletion when the integration requires it.

Test a successful submission, a notification failure, an integration failure, a file upload, and any User Registration workflow. Check the Gravity Forms entry list, the receiving service, email delivery logs, and the uploaded-files location.

Do not assume that an empty entry list proves the form works. If an integration needs to read the entry later, immediate deletion may cause it to fail even though the form confirmation still appears. Keep the retention policy enabled instead when you need a recovery window.

Install and activate Gravity Perks Disable Entry Creation, open the target form, go to Settings, scroll to the Entry Creation section, and enable Disable entry creation. Save the form settings.

The perk lets Gravity Forms process the submission first and then removes the entry and associated files. It also supports conditional logic, which is useful when only some submissions should be deleted. Check your add-ons for asynchronous processing before going live.