Stop Gravity Forms Duplicate Submissions and Notifications

Symptoms

If you’re noticing duplicate entries or notifications coming from your Gravity Forms forms that are exact copies but with unique entry IDs and possibly spaced out over days, weeks, and even months, keep reading to learn how to resolve this issue.

The Cause

This is not a Gravity Forms issue, but rather an issue caused by the browser. Since the browser keeps a copy of the last request (in this case the form submission) in its local memory for the tab, it can re-perform that request each time the tab reloads until the user either closes the tab or navigates to another page.

This is really common on mobile devices where you might just close the browser app and not the tabs. So once the app is opened and the tabs reloaded, all requests are performed again by the browser.

How To Fix It

Gravity Forms has some built-in techniques to help prevent duplicate submissions.

1. Instead of using a text confirmation, configure your forms to use the Page or Redirect confirmation type.

NOTE: Using this method will help reduce duplicate submissions but you can still receive some duplicates for users that might already have the form page opened on their browsers.

2. If your form has a field that you could consider as a source of unique data, you can enable the No Duplicates setting for it.

You can learn about how this feature works here: https://docs.gravityforms.com/common-field-settings/#no-duplicates

Some third party options

There are also a couple third-party solutions you can use that can help prevent duplicate submissions:

• GF No Duplicates (free plugin – built by a Gravity Forms support engineer)
• Limit Submissions (free code snippet)
• Limit Submissions (paid add-on)

Need More Help?

If you have an active Gravity Forms license, you can also open a support ticket here.

If you still need help and Gravity Forms support isn’t an option, feel free to use the comments or chat options below.