Question from Reddit user:
Hi!
I’m on GHL’s $97/m plan and want to set up automatic weekly exports of all my CRM leads as a backup (CSV or excel).
I know I can do manual export, but I need this to run on a schedule- has anyone successfully automated this?
Any advice or examples would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks!
Answer from Nabil:
The short answer is:
Since the GoHighLevel (GHL) $97/m plan does not include an internal feature for scheduled full-CRM exports, you have to bypass the manual interface and leverage GHL’s API using a third-party automation tool.
The most reliable and efficient way to set up a weekly backup is to use an automation platform like Make or Zapier (or a similar tool) with a scheduled trigger that makes a call to the HighLevel API’s contact search or contact list endpoint, pulls all your leads in batches, and then uses the Google Sheets API connection in the same tool to automatically dump that data into a Google Sheet every week.
The long answer is:
That’s a smart backup strategy, and while GHL is excellent for workflows, it’s not designed for scheduled, bulk CRM data exports directly inside the platform’s UI.
The manual export feature will always be a tedious, one-off task.
Your $97/m plan gives you the necessary API access to implement a reliable, scheduled solution.
You need an external automation mechanism to initiate the export, and this mechanism will rely heavily on the HighLevel API.
The API allows you to programmatically request contact data from your sub-account.
Since GHL’s API usually returns contacts in paginated batches (for example, 100 records at a time), your automation scenario needs to be configured to make repeated API calls, looping through all the pages until all contacts have been retrieved—a process known as handling pagination.
To accomplish the scheduling and data transfer without writing custom code, you should use a no-code or low-code automation tool like Make or Zapier.
You would set up a scenario in that tool with a Scheduler module as the trigger, which you’d set to run every week.
The next step would involve the GHL module to Search Contacts or Get Contacts, configured to handle the pagination to grab every lead.
Once you have the full dataset, the final step would be to use the Google Sheets API module to create a new sheet or append the data to a designated master backup sheet, which automatically converts the JSON data from the API into clean rows and columns.
While this method requires a modest recurring fee for the automation platform, it provides a set-and-forget weekly backup solution that’s far more robust than relying on manual CSV exports.
For the most advanced, high-volume scenarios that might exceed the limits or become too costly on standard automation tools, a custom script running on a serverless platform like Google Cloud Platform (GCP) or integrated via a custom webhook from a server-side tagging gateway like Stape (using Google Tag Manager to manage the execution) would be the most scalable and cost-effective approach for managing the API calls and pushing data via the Google Sheets API.
This gives you maximum control over the export frequency and data fields.
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