Forms → Import lists every Contact Form 7 form on the site. Tick the ones you want and the questions, their options, their required flags and their field names come across. Contact Form 7 does not even have to be active.
Download free Read the import guideEvery import arrives as a draft, with a report of anything that could not come across.
It has been doing one job well for nearly twenty years: put a form in a page and email it to you. If that is all you need, keep it - genuinely.
People move because the job grew. They want to read the answers back without digging
through their inbox, cap the number of registrations, get paid at the same
time, or hand the form over to a colleague who does not write markup. That is the point
at which a text box full of [text* your-name] stops being the right tool.
| Contact Form 7 | LocalForm | |
|---|---|---|
| Building a form | Form tags typed into a block of markup | Drag-and-drop questions, with a live preview |
| Where answers go | Email only, unless you add a storage plugin | Stored on your site, with email as well |
| Reading the results | Your inbox | Counts, charts and per-question summaries in the admin |
| Getting the data out | Copy and paste | XLSX or CSV export, WP-CLI, REST API |
| A page for the form | You build one and paste the shortcode | Every form gets its own page and link - or use the shortcode |
| Limits and scheduling | Not built in | Maximum registrations, opening and closing date and time |
| Taking payment | Add-ons | Stripe, Mollie or WooCommerce (Pro) |
| Licence | GPL, free | GPL, free - Pro is a separate add-on |
Nothing conflicts. Both plugins can sit there while you decide, and your existing forms keep working exactly as they do now.
The Contact Form 7 card lists the forms found on this site. Tick the ones you want and press Import selected forms.
Each form arrives as a draft. Contact Form 7 keeps no labels of its own, so LocalForm reads the words next to each tag - right nearly always, worth a glance before you publish.
The old email settings do not come across. Put your address on the Notifications tab, and write the confirmation the person filling it in should get.
Replace [contact-form-7 ...] with [localform id="123"] on the page, or
use the LocalForm block. Then deactivate the old plugin when you are happy.
The questions and their wording, their type, their options, and which ones are required.
Field names are kept. A question arriving at a webhook as
your-email still arrives as your-email.
A tick box keeps the sentence written after it, so
[acceptance accept-1] I agree to the house rules becomes a consent question saying
exactly that.
The responses. They stay where they are - export them from the old form if you need them.
The emails. LocalForm has its own, on the Notifications tab.
The styling. An imported form uses your LocalForm colours and font like any other.
Submit buttons, hidden fields and CAPTCHA tags are dropped - none of them asks the visitor anything.
No. Its forms stay in the database when the plugin is deactivated, which is exactly the moment you are most likely to want them.
No - an import copies the questions, not the responses. Export them from the old form first if you need to keep them.
Field names are kept, so what you built against the old form keeps working.
Yes - same screen, same rules, and WPForms Lite forms import as well. Compound fields like a split Name become a single question, and the import report names each one so you know what to tidy.
No. It arrives as a draft with a report of anything left out, so you read it through first.
Install the free plugin, import a single form, and look at what the Responses tab shows you after a week. That is usually the whole argument.
Download free Read the import guide