Ollie Mobile Menu Not Working: Overlays, Submenus and the WordPress 7.1 Fix

Five ways the Ollie hamburger lets a phone visitor down

Before you change a setting, write down exactly what happens, on which phone, and whether you were logged in. On an Ollie site each symptom points at a different part of a small machine, and the general guide to broken mobile menus explains why logged-in testing so often lies.

• Every submenu is already open when the overlay appears, so a ten-item menu becomes a forty-line scroll.
• Tapping the arrow does nothing, or the submenu flickers open and shut.
• There is no hamburger at all, and the full desktop row is squeezed onto the phone screen.
• The overlay looks plain, without the panel or card design you built, or it never opens.
• The top of the open menu hides under the black admin bar, but only for you, because only logged-in users see that bar.

The first symptom has a name and a version number. The others are settings, caches and plugins, and they take five minutes each to rule in or out.

No theme script: what actually runs Ollie's phone menu

Open Ollie 1.6.3's parts folder and the header template is a single line. It inserts a pattern called Header Light, which holds a site title and WordPress's core Navigation block, saved with submenus set to open on click. Core renders the hamburger, the overlay and the toggles, and core's Interactivity API script handles the taps. Ollie contributes core-navigation.css, a stylesheet registered with wp_enqueue_block_style() so it loads only on pages where a Navigation block renders.

That stylesheet makes one decision that matters here. Inside the open overlay it hides every submenu, then shows a submenu only when its toggle button carries aria-expanded set to true. Core's default overlay shows every submenu item at once; Ollie turns them into tidy accordions with a 60-pixel tap target on the right. Remember that rule. The WordPress 7.1 bug lives inside it.

Suspects on an Ollie site, most likely first

1. Ollie is older than 1.6.3 and WordPress is on 7.1

WordPress 7.1 changed how the Navigation block binds each submenu toggle's aria-expanded attribute. It now reads a value that reports true for every toggle while the overlay is open. Ollie's stylesheet obeys the attribute, so every submenu opened at once. A forum report traced it to core and suspected it could affect all block themes. Ollie 1.6.3, released September 2, 2026, adds a filter on the rendered Navigation block that rebinds the toggles to per-submenu state, as core behaved before 7.1. Check: Appearance, Themes shows the Ollie version. View the page source and search for data-wp-bind--aria-expanded; a value of state.isSubmenuOpen means the fix is not reaching that page.

2. A cache is still serving the old header

Ollie's fix rewrites the menu markup when PHP builds the page. A page cached before you updated still carries the old attribute, so the update appears to have done nothing for visitors while you, logged in and uncached, see a working menu. Check: open the site in a private window and compare. Purge the caching plugin, the host's cache and any CDN, then test again.

3. Overlay visibility is set to Off, or the header part differs

Select the Navigation block in the header and open the Settings tab. The Overlay section offers Off, Mobile and Always. Off never collapses the menu, which explains a missing hamburger. Ollie's own docs note you can create several header parts and assign them per template, so one template can carry a Navigation block with different settings. Check: open every header under Patterns, All Template Parts, and compare the Overlay setting in each.

4. A Menu Designer menu without its plugin

The free Ollie Menu Designer plugin adds a Mobile Menu panel to the Navigation block's settings and saves your design as a template part. Its FAQ says those template parts survive if the plugin is deactivated, but the menu stops working. Check: Plugins screen. If Menu Designer is inactive and a mobile menu is assigned, reactivate it or remove the assignment.

5. An optimizer delaying core's menu script

Script delay features hold JavaScript until the first tap or scroll. On a menu, the first tap is spent waking the script. Check: switch off delay and combine for one test; if the menu recovers, exclude the Navigation block's view script. If the console shows red errors, read our guide to theme JavaScript errors.

Behavior that looks broken but is a setting

Some complaints about Ollie menus are not faults at all. They are core's rules, applied faithfully.

• The parent page is unreachable. With Submenu visibility set to Click, as Ollie's header pattern ships, core prints each parent item as a toggle button rather than a link. Add the parent page again as the first item inside its own submenu.
• No hamburger between 600 pixels and tablet width. In Mobile mode the core overlay is a small-screen feature, and the block offers no breakpoint control. Menu Designer's Mobile Menu panel has a breakpoint setting, 600 pixels by default, if tablets need the compact menu too.
• Mega menus that open on hover. Menu Designer has an Open on hover toggle. Version 0.3.3 made mega menus open on click for touch devices, so update the plugin before blaming the theme.
• The admin bar covering the menu. Ollie 1.6.3 starts the overlay below the admin bar. Visitors never saw the problem; only logged-in editors did.

Getting the Ollie menu to open properly again

1. 1

   Copy the site to staging

   Menus live in the database as Navigation posts and template parts. Test changes on a copy so a wrong click does not reach customers.

2. 2

   Update Ollie to 1.6.3 or later

   On WordPress 7.1 this is the fix for submenus that open expanded. If you run a child theme, update the parent; the filter lives in Ollie's functions.php.

3. 3

   Purge every cache layer

   Plugin cache, host cache and CDN, in that order. Then load the page logged out and search the source for the aria-expanded binding.

4. 4

   Check Overlay visibility in every header part

   Appearance, Editor, Patterns, All Template Parts. Set Mobile wherever a phone should see a hamburger, and keep Show icon button on unless you want text labels.

5. 5

   Confirm who owns the overlay

   Either core's default, a WordPress 7.0 overlay template from the Overlay template section, or a Menu Designer mobile menu. Pick one, and make sure its plugin is active if it needs one.

6. 6

   Test without script optimization

   Disable delay and combine for one test. If the menu works, exclude the Navigation script rather than leaving optimization off for good.

7. 7

   Retest on a real phone

   Open the menu, expand two submenus, follow a link, and repeat on a second browser. Desktop emulation misses touch behavior.

If the steps point at an update that went wrong rather than a setting, the guide to a theme that broke after an update covers rollbacks. Menus are also the first thing a phone visitor taps, so a slow response there counts against Interaction to Next Paint, which the Ollie speed guide discusses alongside the theme's other costs.

Keeping a core-powered menu steady through core releases

• Update Ollie within days of each major WordPress release, and read its changelog first. The 1.5.1, 1.6.1 and 1.6.3 entries all touch mobile menu behavior.
• Hold WordPress major updates on staging until the theme has caught up, then update both together.
• Purge the page cache after every theme update, not just after content edits.
• Use one overlay system per site: core's default, a core overlay template, or Menu Designer. Two systems mean two sets of settings to forget.
• Make tapping the phone menu, logged out, part of every update checklist. Our hosting and maintenance plans do exactly that on staging before anything goes live.

Other Ollie problems have their own guides: fonts that will not load and layouts that fall apart. The theme as a whole is assessed in our Ollie review, and the wider troubleshooting library covers every theme we track. For the same core mechanism on WordPress's default theme, see Twenty Twenty-Five's mobile menu.

One menu, two release calendars

Nothing in this story was careless. WordPress improved its Navigation block, Ollie had styled the old behavior, and for a few weeks the two disagreed on every phone that visited. That is the price of a theme built on core blocks: you inherit WordPress's progress and its regressions on WordPress's schedule, then wait for a two-person team to respond. They responded quickly. The next core release will test them again.

In a Next.js build the menu is one component in the site's own code, tested with the rest of the site before it ships, and no outside release can change it overnight. It costs more up front, and layout changes need a developer. Ollie vs Next.js weighs that trade fairly, and moving an Ollie site to Next.js explains why block content travels well. Editing afterward happens in Athena CMS. If you would rather keep Ollie and hand the problem over, our theme troubleshooting service fixes it on staging first.