WordPress’s Screen Options panel — the small tab in the top-right corner of most admin list screens — lets you choose which columns are visible. What it doesn’t tell you is that its choices only apply on desktop. Below WordPress’s own 782px breakpoint, every column except the row’s primary title collapses behind a tap-to-expand toggle, regardless of what Screen Options says.
Two separate concerns, one setting
Desktop visibility and mobile visibility are genuinely different questions — a manager checking the orders list from their phone between calls needs a much smaller, more curated set of columns than someone at a desktop reviewing the full table. WordPress core has no mechanism to express that difference; it treats “visible” as one universal state.
A second, mobile-specific settings panel
We added a small, collapsible panel above the orders list — Also show on mobile… — separate from the native Screen Options tab, listing the same toggleable columns (Status, Total, Mobile number, Courier Tx ID, and others) with checkboxes for which ones should stay visible on a phone screen, layered on top of whatever’s already chosen for desktop.
The choice is saved once, site-wide, and enforced by dynamically generated CSS scoped to WordPress’s own mobile breakpoint — each selected column gets a targeted display: table-cell !important rule that overrides the platform’s default collapse behaviour for that column only, leaving everything unselected to collapse as normal.
Why it starts collapsed
The panel itself is hidden behind a small toggle link rather than shown permanently — it’s a configuration surface used rarely, not a daily-use control, and a permanently open settings box above every visit to the orders list would have added exactly the kind of clutter this feature exists to prevent on mobile.
Key takeaways
- WordPress’s responsive column collapsing is aggressive and not configurable out of the box — it hides data regardless of a site owner’s explicit Screen Options choices.
- Desktop and mobile visibility are separate decisions and deserve separate controls, not one setting doing double duty.
- A rarely-used settings surface should default to collapsed, even when it’s genuinely useful — visibility of a control should match how often it’s touched.
Running into a similar limitation in your own WooCommerce or WordPress admin? Let’s Talk — Artintech Solution builds exactly this kind of custom store tooling.