I was also forced to use the “nuclear” option and hide the footer widgets on all but the front page with CSS on my child theme. I had set the global options to no footer widgets with the intent to show 4 on the home page only. Only problem was that every time I went to make the change on the home page, after updating, the original settings remained. I tried several times and every time was the same.
I finally set the global settings to 4 footer widgets for all and added this to my header:
if ( is_front_page() ) {
echo "<style type=\"text/css\">.footer-widgets{display:none}</style>";
}Don’t know if this is a plugin or a theme issue but until it’s resolved, feel free to use my solution.