If instead of a website you see some hieroglyphic gibberish — you might have enabled a wrong character encoding system. You can change it in the .htaccess file.
How to change character encoding via .htaccess
- Log into cPanel
- On the dashboard, click on File manager.
- Go to the public_html folder.
- By default, .htaccess is hidden. So click the Settings button and check the Show hidden files (dotfiles) mark.
- Now click on .htaccess and click Edit.
- Add at the beginning of the file:
AddDefaultCharset UTF-8 – if you want UTF-8 encoding
AddDefaultCharset WINDOWS-1250 – if you want Windows-1250 - After you are done with the file, click on Save changes.
You also should check which encoding is being used in your database.
How to change the encoding in the database
Now clean your browser’s cache by pressing Ctrl+F5 and check whether your website is displayed correctly.