Importing dates in UTC timezone
Gravity Forms stores the created, updated and payment dates in the Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) timezone. GravityImport allows you to set those 3 dates to a value of your choice and will automatically apply the UTC time offset. However, you can bypass the automatic time offset application by toggling the “date is in UTC timezone” option.
The three common scenarios where you would want to do that are as follows:
- Your WordPress site is configured to use a UTC time offset (check the Timezone option in Settings→General)
- You are importing data that was exported from Gravity Forms
- You know that the dates are already in UTC timezone
For example, if you are located in New York and are importing the date value of 2020-12-31 19:00:00 (7 p.m. on December 31, 2020), it will be saved as 2021-01-01 00:00:00 (midnight on January 1, 2021) in the database but will still be treated by WordPress as 2020-12-31 19:00:00.
If this conversion does not take place, your date will be saved as is but treated by WordPress as 2020-12-31 14:00:00 (2 p.m. on December 31, 2020).
Related: “Date Created” field is inaccurate.
