Character Encoding issue in WordPress after migration

If you start seeing weird characters instead of special characters such as the ampersand (&), or the copyright symbol ©, after migrating WordPress to a new server, try the following.

1) Download ‘wp-config.php’ from the root directory where you installed WordPress.

2) Open it, find the following 2 lines:

define('DB_CHARSET', 'utf8');
define('DB_COLLATE', '');

and comment them out:

//define('DB_CHARSET', 'utf8');
//define('DB_COLLATE', '');

3) Re-upload the updated ‘wp-config.php’ file overwriting the old one.

If you cannot find the two lines above in your ‘wp-config.php’ file, try adding them instead. Some hosts strip them out.