Hey – My website https://barrettmedia.com is showing several “Active” menu items. However – if you use a cachebusting URL – the correct behavior is observed
https://barrettmedia.com?cache. This is only happening on the homepage, the inner pages are correct – is there a way to fix this?
Hi,
That’s probably caused by the caching or the optimization. Depending on which plugin you use, I suggest checking options that optimize the CSS. Try disabling CSS related optimization options from the plugin you are using to see if the issue is solved.
I don’t think I’ve seen such an issue before, so I’m not sure why this happens or what to suggest exactly. It is a bit strange that it’s affecting only the homepage.
I’ll check the page more and if I find something I’ll let you know.
Thank you!
Claude for the win! – Found it — confirmed directly in the page’s DOM. The cause is a menu link URL collision, not a bug in the “active state” logic itself:
The root issue: Under each of the SPORTS, NEWS, MUSIC, and BUSINESS dropdowns, the “Writers” submenu header is set to link to https://barrettmedia.com/ — the homepage — instead of a real anchor page (probably because there’s no dedicated “Writers” landing page, so whoever built the menu left the URL pointing at home as a placeholder).
WordPress’s nav walker assigns the current-menu-item / current_page_item classes (which drive the “active” styling) by comparing each menu item’s URL to the current page’s URL. Since four separate “Writers” items all share the exact same href as HOME, all of them get flagged current/active whenever you’re on the homepage — alongside HOME itself, which is correctly active.
That’s 5 “active” items per menu instance (HOME + 4x Writers). And because the theme renders the same nav markup three times in the DOM (desktop menu, mobile menu, and what looks like a sticky/duplicate header version — all sharing the menu-fall-2025-main-menu-2 menu), it shows up 15 times total in the page.
The fix: give each “Writers” submenu parent a real destination (an actual writers/authors archive page, or at minimum a distinct # / non-matching anchor) instead of the bare homepage URL. Once those links stop matching https://barrettmedia.com/, WordPress will stop marking them current, and only HOME will show active on the homepage.
