Arabic Characters Not Displaying Correctly After Database Migration to WordPress
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We are in the process of migrating our websites from AWS to WordPress.com. As part of this, we purchased the Business Plan and followed these steps:
- Exported our WordPress database from AWS RDS as a gzipped SQL file using shell commands on our EC2 instance and stored it in an S3 bucket.
- Downloaded and unzipped the file to obtain a single
.sqlfile. - Uploaded the SQL file to the WordPress.com server via SFTP access.
- Imported the file into the WordPress.com database using SSH access.
The database content appears normal when viewed in PHPMyAdmin—Arabic characters are readable and correctly displayed. However, when we access the website or the CMS, the Arabic content appears as question marks (???).
For example:
- The site title looks correct in the database, but appears as question marks in the CMS.
- When we manually enter the correct Arabic name (أخبار الآن) in the CMS and save it, it looks fine in the CMS, but becomes unreadable in the database.
I attempted to change the server connection collation in PHPMyAdmin to UTF (such as
utf8mb4_general_ci), but this didn’t resolve the issue.Could you please advise on how to fix this and ensure Arabic characters are displayed correctly both in the CMS and on the frontend?
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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Hi there,
I can see the issue here is that your site akhbaralaannet.wpcomstaging.com is using a latin1 charater set (the default for WordPress.com), while likely we need to use UTF8 (as you noted)I am going to send an email to you with further details on how we can proceed here.
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Hi there,
We’ve sent two emails to the email address associated with your account, and we don’t see any blockage, so you should have received them by now. Can you please check your spam or junk folders?
If you’re having issues receiving emails from us, can you contact us directly from your account’s dashboard: https://wordpress.com/support/help-support-options/#how-to-contact-us -
Hi,
We haven’t received any emails regarding our support request—not in the inbox nor in the spam folder.
We also tried using the Support Assistant in the dashboard, but it only responds with:
“No problem. Help is on the way! I’m connecting you with one of our Happiness Engineers,”
without any actual follow-up.This is urgent—we need to launch the website by tomorrow, and the Arabic character encoding issue is still unresolved.
Could you please reply here or send the solution directly to (email visible only to moderators and staff) as soon as possible?
We appreciate your quick assistance.
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Hi @alaanwp, we had offered to handle the migration for you, but that could take a few days. We could also reset the site and add the correct charset, and then have you run your import again. Would that work for you?
Also, I’ve sent the message again and CC’d this other address you mentioned, but I’m guessing there must be a delivery problem. You might change your WordPress.com email address to use some other email provider so we can better get in touch: https://wordpress.com/me/account
Talk to you soon!
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