Creating Your Own Patterns

Ollie’s built-in patterns get you far, but the real workflow unlock is making your own. Any design you build once — a section you’re proud of, a layout your site repeats, a snippet you type constantly — can become a pattern you insert anywhere in two clicks.

Creating a Pattern

1. Build the design with blocks anywhere in the editor — or start from an Ollie pattern and customize it into something yours.
2. Select the blocks (select the outer Group in List View to grab a whole section), click the three-dot Options menu, and choose Create pattern.
3. Name it, optionally assign categories, and choose whether it’s synced.
4. Done — it now appears in your inserter’s Patterns tab, in the My Patterns category.

The synced choice is the important one: synced means every copy stays connected and edits propagate everywhere; unsynced means each insertion is an independent starting point. (More on the difference in Understanding Patterns.)

You can manage everything you’ve created — rename, edit, delete, and toggle sync — under Appearance → Editor → Patterns.

Patterns as Text Snippets

Patterns don’t have to be big designs — they can be tiny and text-only, which turns them into a snippet system. A disclosure paragraph, a standard call-to-action line, your affiliate disclaimer, a signature block: save each as a small pattern and insert it by typing / and the pattern’s name in any empty paragraph.

Make a snippet synced and it becomes centrally managed text — update your disclaimer once and it’s current on every post that uses it. This is one of the most underrated workflows in the block editor, especially for bloggers and content teams.

Tips

• Name patterns for search: “CTA — newsletter, dark” beats “Section 4.” You’ll be finding these in the inserter by name.
• Design your pattern with Global Styles palette colors rather than custom ones, and it’ll survive any future rebrand — same trick Ollie’s own patterns use.
• Building repeating card layouts from your pattern? Smart Sync keeps the copies visually consistent while you iterate.
• Patterns are portable: copy a pattern’s blocks on one site and paste them into another, and with Ollie Pro you can push your own patterns to your theme from the Pattern Library.