Hello Elementor Header and Footer Not Showing: Find the Layer That Dropped Them

A blank strip where the header used to be

Before you change a setting, pin down where the header is missing. Hello has very little code of its own, so the pattern of the failure points almost straight at the layer that caused it. Open the site in a private window, logged out, and check a page, a blog post and the home page on desktop and on a phone. Write down what you see. The general WordPress header not showing guide covers other themes; this one follows Hello's own logic.

• Gone everywhere, header and footer together. The theme's version is off and nothing replaced it. This is the most common Hello case by a wide margin.
• Gone on pages, fine on blog posts. A Canvas layout is in play, either on the page or as the site default.
• A plain header with the site name and a bulleted menu appears instead of your design. Hello is printing its own fallback because your Theme Builder template is not rendering.
• Fine on desktop, missing on phones. A responsive Hide On toggle, not a template problem.
• Fine for you, missing for visitors. A cache is serving a copy from before the template existed.

Who gets to draw the top of a Hello page

Hello's header.php runs a short chain of questions, and the footer.php file runs the same chain at the bottom. First it asks Elementor Pro whether a Theme Builder template claims the header location for this page. If one does, that template prints and the theme stops. If none does, Hello checks whether its own header is allowed. If the Disable theme header & footer setting is on, the answer is no, and the page gets nothing at all.

Two details in the theme source catch people out. The Hello Theme Header panel only appears in Site Settings while the theme header is allowed, so flipping the disable switch makes the panel vanish too, which looks like a bug and is not. And the Site Settings header prints nothing if Site Logo, Tagline and Menu are all set to Hide. Our Hello Elementor review explains the settings page and its three tabs in full.

The suspects, ranked for a Hello site

1. The switch went off before the replacement was ready

Elementor's help article points to Disable theme header & footer for anyone building a header and footer in the Theme Builder. People often do that step first, then never finish or publish the templates. To check, view the page source and search for site-header. If you find neither Hello's header element nor a block with the class elementor-location-header, nothing is claiming the spot. Look at WP Admin > Hello, on the Structure and layout tab.

2. Display conditions that point somewhere else

A Theme Builder template with no conditions never prints. Open Elementor > Theme Builder, select the header, click Edit Conditions and confirm it includes Entire Site, or the exact pages you expect. Look for an Exclude rule added during a redesign and forgotten. Elementor also notes that a template saved as a draft or private does not appear on the live site, so check that the editor's button reads Update rather than Publish.

3. A Canvas page, or a Canvas default you forgot about

Elementor Canvas means no header and no footer, by design. Open the page in the editor, click Page Settings and look at Page Layout. If it says Default, the real answer lives one level up, in Site Settings > Layout > Default Page Layout. When that default is Canvas, every page built with Elementor on the Default layout loses its header while blog posts written in the block editor keep theirs. That is the signature of this cause.

4. Elementor Pro switched off or lapsed

The function Hello calls to ask about Theme Builder templates comes from Elementor Pro. Deactivate Pro, or delete it during a plugin cleanup, and Hello stops asking. With the theme header disabled, the page goes bare. Elementor's renewal article says that when a subscription expires, Pro features stop until you renew or connect a new license, so check Elementor > License. Activation loops are covered on our Elementor Pro license repair page.

5. Hiding rules and caches

If the header disappears on one device only, select the header's outer container, open Advanced > Responsive and look at the Hide On toggles. If it disappears only for visitors, a page cache, an optimizer or a CDN is serving an old copy. Elementor's fix for stale output is the Clear Files & Data button under Elementor Cache in its Tools screen, followed by a purge of every cache layer you run.

Putting the header and footer back on a Hello site

Work on a staging copy if you have one. Each step below either confirms a cause or rules it out, so stop when the header returns and note which step did it. If the trouble began right after an update, read Elementor update broke the layout first, since a version mismatch between Elementor and Pro produces the same blank strip.

1. 1

   Read the page source

   Logged out, view the source of an affected page and search for site-header and elementor-location-header. Neither means nothing is rendering. Hello's header means your template is not matching.

2. 2

   Confirm Elementor Pro is active

   Check the Plugins screen, then Elementor > License. Renew or reconnect before touching anything else, because every later step depends on Pro running.

3. 3

   Fix the template's conditions

   In Elementor > Theme Builder, open the header and footer, click Edit Conditions, set Entire Site unless you need something narrower, remove stale Exclude rules, and publish.

4. 4

   Check the page layout and the default

   In Page Settings, change Elementor Canvas to Default or Elementor Full Width. Then open Site Settings > Layout and make sure Default Page Layout is not Canvas.

5. 5

   Decide which header Hello should allow

   If you use Theme Builder for both, leave Disable theme header & footer on. If you rely on Hello's own header, turn it off and confirm Site Logo, Tagline or Menu is set to Show in Site Settings > Hello Theme Header.

6. 6

   Clear Elementor's files and every cache

   Press Clear Files & Data in Elementor's Tools screen, then purge the caching plugin, the host cache and any CDN, in that order.

7. 7

   Retest the full spread

   Check a page, a post, an archive and the 404 page on a phone and a desktop, logged out. A footer can fail where the header works, so look at both.

Keeping the header attached through the next round of updates

• Build first, switch second. Publish the Theme Builder header and footer with conditions set, check them live, and only then enable Disable theme header & footer.
• Write the Canvas pages down. Landing pages on Canvas are deliberate. Keep a short list so nobody mistakes them for a fault, and so nobody sets Canvas as the site default by accident.
• Watch the license date. Put the Elementor Pro renewal on the same calendar as the domain and the SSL certificate. A lapsed Pro license on a Hello site is a design risk, not just an update risk.
• Update Elementor and Pro together. Elementor's own guidance on mismatched versions applies doubly here, because the header depends on Pro answering Hello's question.
• Choose your fallback on purpose. With the disable switch off and a logo and Header menu assigned, Hello prints a plain header whenever no template claims the spot. With it on, a Pro outage means no header at all.

That last choice is a real trade. Leaving Hello's header allowed keeps its header-footer.css, 7,534 bytes in version 3.5.1, and a small menu script loading on every page even while a Theme Builder header covers it. Our Hello Elementor speed guide counts those bytes against the rest of the page. For most sites a plain fallback is worth the weight; for a site tuned to the last request, it may not be.

A header that depends on a license renewal

Step back and look at what this problem says about the site. The free theme, the free builder and the paid add-on each hold a piece of the most visible element on every page, and the piece that draws your actual design is the one with a renewal date. Nobody chose that arrangement on purpose. It is just how a Hello site is assembled.

On a Hello site, the header is a subscription with a logo on it.

For many businesses that trade is fine, and a tidy routine keeps it working. When the header, the menu and the footer keep failing for different reasons, the Hello Elementor vs Next.js comparison lays out the alternative: a site where the header is part of one tested codebase, with no license deciding whether it appears. The Hello Elementor to Next.js plan shows how the move works, and we keep your URLs and redirect every old one. Your team still edits content through Athena CMS.

If the header vanished alongside other trouble, the same stack produces a hamburger menu that will not open, styles that fail to load and layouts that shift after updates. The Elementor repair hub handles builder-wide damage, and the troubleshooting section covers every theme we track.