Hiding categories doesn’t work

Hi there,

we are using OceanWp and Elementor for one of our client sites. Elementor is used only for posts and pages, the footer still comes from OceanWp where we’ve chosen a simple WP Category Widget.

Now we only want to exclude the category with ID=1 (general), but nothing of the following solutions has worked:
+ using exlude-function in the child theme’s function.php
+ using plug-in “ultimate category excluder”

Any idea what else can be done?

Thanks a lot and kind regards
AH