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Fixing WordPress Character Encoding Issues: From Garbled Text to Emoji Problems

23 threads Sep 16, 2025 Core → Fixing wordpress

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Why Is My WordPress Site Showing ????? or Garbled Text?

If you've ever published a WordPress post containing Arabic, Hindi, Chinese, or other non-Latin characters—or even tried to use an emoji—only to be greeted by a string of question marks (?????), hollow boxes (□), or other garbled 'mojibake' text, you're not alone. This is a common character encoding issue that stems from how WordPress, your database, and your server communicate.

What Causes Character Encoding Problems?

Based on community reports, these issues typically occur for a few key reasons:

  • Outdated Database Character Set: Older WordPress installations (pre-2016) often used the 'utf8' character set, which doesn't fully support characters like emojis or many non-Latin scripts. The modern standard is 'utf8mb4'.
  • Server or Database Configuration: Your web server might be sending an incorrect character set header, or the database itself may have been created with the wrong collation.
  • Backup and Restore Inconsistencies: Restoring a database backup from a server with one character set (e.g., latin1) to a server with another (e.g., UTF-8) can corrupt text if not handled correctly.
  • Theme or Plugin Conflicts: In rare cases, code from a theme or plugin can interfere with how characters are output.

How to Troubleshoot and Fix Encoding Issues

1. Check and Convert Your Database Character Set (Advanced)

The most permanent fix is often to ensure your database is using the modern 'utf8mb4' character set and 'utf8mb4_unicode_ci' collation. Warning: Always create a full database backup before attempting this.

  1. Use a tool like phpMyAdmin to inspect your database's character set.
  2. Use a reliable database conversion method. The 'Fixing WordPress' team suggests using a trusted script or plugin designed for this specific conversion, as manually running ALTER commands on large tables can be risky.
  3. After converting the database, ensure your `wp-config.php` file contains the correct definitions: 
    define( 'DB_CHARSET', 'utf8mb4' );
define( 'DB_COLLATE', 'utf8mb4_unicode_ci' );

2. Verify Your Server's Character Set Headers

Sometimes, the issue is not the database but the HTTP headers your server sends. A server misconfiguration can cause it to announce the wrong character set. Contact your hosting provider's support and ask them to verify that the server is correctly configured to serve pages with a UTF-8 character set.

3. Rule Out Theme and Plugin Conflicts

Temporarily switch to a default WordPress theme like Twenty Twenty-Four and disable all plugins. If the text displays correctly, reactivate your theme and plugins one by one to identify the culprit. This is a common first step recommended for many WordPress issues.

4. Special Case: Forcing Twemoji (Twitter-style emojis)

If your specific issue is about controlling which emoji style is displayed, you can use custom code. A user in the community shared a solution that can be added to your theme's `functions.php` file to force the use of Twemojis. Always use a child theme when modifying theme files.

When to Seek More Specialized Help

If your problem involves a specific commercial theme (like Divi or Avada) or plugin (like ACF, Polylang, or WooCommerce), the best course of action is to seek help from that product's dedicated support forum. Their developers are best equipped to handle conflicts within their own code.

Character encoding can be a complex topic, but systematically checking your database, server, and third-party code is the best path to a solution.

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