Thank you Wes!
Yes, I have done the 1st item you instruct about activating home widgets.
I have deactivated all plug-ins.
We did have some custom calls added to functions.php. We commented those out and tested.
The issue lines up with an XML import of our posts and media library from the old site. It was a large file, that I had to split into 14 parts, following instructions of a person who had done it for a WP site. I noticed odd characters that popped up in posts after the import. Also, there was duplication of image paths in the media library (ive experienced this before).
Do you think the import could be responsible for this?
Upon looking at the source code of the homepage It looks like the typical post/page content-sidebar-wrap section is called which includes an empty “content” div area and then calls for the sidebar section…
<div class=”site-inner”><div class=”wrap”><div class=”content-sidebar-wrap”><main class=”content” role=”main” itemprop=”mainContentOfPage” itemscope=”itemscope” itemtype=”http://schema.org/Blog”></main><aside class=”sidebar sidebar-primary widget-area” role=”complementary” itemscope=”itemscope” itemtype=”http://schema.org/WPSideBar”>
Thanks Wes!