How to filter form submissions in WordPress

First decide whether you are filtering submissions for yourself in the WordPress dashboard or letting visitors filter displayed results on a page. These are different jobs. Gravity Forms, for example, lets administrators browse, sort and filter stored entries from its Entries screen.

For a public directory, staff list or member dashboard, do not expose the raw entry table. Use a controlled View that displays only the fields visitors are allowed to see.

Open your form plugin’s entries or submissions screen and select the form you need. Use the available status filters first, such as unread, starred, spam or trash, then use the search or field filters supplied by the plugin.

This route is usually enough for internal work such as finding a customer, checking submissions from a period, or reviewing spam. It does not create a searchable results page for site visitors.

List the fields that should narrow the results, such as location, category, approval status, submission date, assigned user or payment status. Prefer controlled fields such as dropdowns, radio buttons and checkboxes when you can; free-text values are harder to search consistently.

Decide whether conditions should use AND logic, where every condition must match, or OR logic, where any condition can match. Write the rule in plain language before building it, for example: “Status is Open AND category is Support”.

To let visitors search submissions, create a View connected to the form and add only the fields that are safe to display. Configure the View’s search and sorting controls, then place it on a page. Keep private fields such as phone numbers, addresses and internal notes out of the layout.

Filtering rows is different from hiding a field. A row-level filter removes non-matching submissions from the results; field conditional logic only changes which columns or values appear inside a row.

If you are comfortable maintaining code, add the rules at the query stage used by the View rather than fetching every entry and removing rows afterwards. GravityView documents an early search-arguments filter for field conditions and a query action for more complex SQL conditions. Keep the View’s existing conditions when modifying its query, or you can accidentally discard approval, security or other filters.

Filtering after entries have been fetched is a poor default: the displayed rows may change while the total count and pagination still describe the unfiltered query. Use this approach only for logic that cannot be expressed in the query.

Test as an administrator, a normal logged-in user and a logged-out visitor. Confirm that a user cannot change a URL parameter to reveal another person’s submission. For user-specific results, filter by the stored entry owner or assigned user rather than trusting a hidden form field alone.

If the View is empty, check that it contains fields, that test entries exist in the connected form, that approval settings are not hiding them, and that any required security attribute is present. These are common causes of apparently missing entries.

For visitor-facing filtering, use the GravityView Advanced Filtering Extension. In the View editor, open Filter & Sort, add an advanced condition, choose the field or entry property, select the operator and value, then combine conditions with AND, OR or groups. The extension applies conditions to which entries appear, including filters by field value, date, approval status, user or role.

Choose this route when visitors need to narrow directory or listing results without custom query code. The manual dashboard route remains fine for internal filtering, so do not add a front-end filtering extension unless visitors actually need to search displayed submissions.