How to Fix the Character Encoding Problem in WordPress
Categories: Wordpress
I recently changed my web hosting again in an attempt to speed up the page load time of my website. I had to do it as the former hosting’s page response time was horrible. It was taking 9 seconds for my home page to load with the former hosting. Now my home page loads under 4 seconds! It’s amazing the difference it makes… now I don’t get angry when browsing my own site (I wonder what my visitors were thinking while waiting for the page to load!).
Anyway, The transfer was smooth but I had a slight issue that I noticed after the transfer. There were special characters similar to the following scattered throughout my blog posts:
I was pretty sure that this was a character encoding mismatch problem. I got a little scared thinking it would take a long time to fix but then I found a really easy way to solve it.
Fixing the Character Encoding Mismatch Problem in WordPress
- Open the ‘wp-config.php’ file in a text editor such as notepad (the wp-config.php file can be found on the directory where you installed WordPress).
- Find the following two lines and comment them out:
define(‘DB_COLLATE’, ”);
They should look like the following after you comment them out:
//define(‘DB_COLLATE’, ”);
- Now upload the updated ‘wp-config.php’ file to your webhost.
This character encoding problem can happen after a database upgrade too so it doesn’t hurt to keep this trick in your mind just in case.
#1 by George Serradinho on July 6, 2009 - 10:41 am
I had that once when I backed up my database and then had to reload it as it was corrupt. At that stage I had a few posts so I actually ended up edit the posts one by one.
I will remember this tip if it happens again.
#2 by Charles on July 16, 2009 - 1:28 pm
What web host did you switch to?
Your site is indeed faster now and I’m sure the web host plays a role.
best,
Charles
#3 by admin on July 16, 2009 - 8:36 pm
Hi Charles, I switched to InMotion Hosting. Yeah so far I am happy with them. I really hate it when a webhosting company puts you on an overpopulated server and your site runs like a dog.