Site Migrated from staging to Live domain

This thread is resolved. Here is a description of the problem and solution.

Problem:
After migrating a site from a staging server to a live domain, there are character encoding issues indicated by garbled text like “Ð‘ÑŠÐ»Ð³Ð°Ñ€Ñ¸ÑÐºÐ”. The client is concerned about whether they need to re-register the WPML site key and if they will lose previously translated data.
Solution:
The issue likely stems from the database tables or their columns not using a UTF-8 compatible collation. We recommend setting your database tables and columns to:

utf8mb4_unicode_520_ci

or another utf8mb4 collation supported by your hosting environment. For more details, visit WPML Minimum Requirements. If you are unsure how to adjust this, please contact your hosting provider to update the database collation safely.

This solution might be irrelevant if it's outdated or not applicable to your case. We highly recommend checking related known issues at https://wpml.org/known-issues/, verifying the version of the permanent fix, and confirming that you have installed the latest versions of themes and plugins. If the issue persists, please open a new support ticket.

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Tagged: Exception

This topic contains 6 replies, has 1 voice.

Last updated by Andrey 3 weeks, 4 days ago.

Assisted by: Andrey.

Author	Posts
May 18, 2026 at 2:31 pm #18043448
pibhubP	Hello, I have migrated my site from statging server to live domain and WPML plugin do I have to again register for the site key. In this process will I lose the data that was already translated in the statging environment.?
May 18, 2026 at 2:57 pm #18043523
pibhubP	Hello, For the live domain the required steps are done and the WPML data from staging to live is also done successfully. Many of the words containing the Portuguese alphabet are not as per the staging site. It contains some strange symbols. Below is the attached screenshot. marked in red and there are many like this
May 18, 2026 at 8:57 pm #18044255
Andrey WPML Supporter since 06/2013 Languages: English (English ) Russian (Русский ) Timezone: Europe/Kyiv (GMT+03:00)	Thank you for contacting WPML support. If you see something like “Ð‘ÑŠÐ»Ð³Ð°Ñ€ÑÐºÐ”, this indicates a database character encoding issue. Most likely, your database tables (or some of their columns) are not using a UTF-8 compatible collation. Please make sure that your database tables and columns are set to: utf8mb4_unicode_520_ci (or another utf8mb4 collation supported by your hosting environment) You can find more details here: https://wpml.org/home/minimum-requirements/collation-and-charset/ If you’re unsure how to adjust this, I recommend contacting your hosting provider so they can safely update the database collation for you.
May 19, 2026 at 6:23 am #18044557
pibhubP	Hello Andrey, Thanks for the information. We have connected with our hosting provider for this issue. Another is, there is this Portfolio/past events section (image attched), we want to translate it to Portuguese language but the edit tranlation icon/page is not avaialble as you can see in the attached screenshot. How can we translate these page? New threads created by Andrey and linked to this one are listed below: https://wpml.org/forums/topic/split-portfolio-the-edit-tranlation-icon-page-is-not-avaialble/
May 19, 2026 at 5:49 pm #18046792
Andrey WPML Supporter since 06/2013 Languages: English (English ) Russian (Русский ) Timezone: Europe/Kyiv (GMT+03:00)	Thank you for your feedback. To keep everything organized and ensure each question receives the attention it deserves, I’ve created a new support ticket for a new question. I will assist you there: https://wpml.org/forums/topic/split-portfolio-the-edit-tranlation-icon-page-is-not-avaialble/
May 20, 2026 at 5:43 am #18047211
pibhubP	Hello Andrey, Below is the service provider's reply The collation has been changed but the data was stored with the values, you would need to re-save the data with the correct characters as the website still seems to be showing the wrong characters. So we are again reworking on the portuguese content. Attached screenshot, HOw do we change this (marked in red) becuase its coming from the plugin by default.?
May 20, 2026 at 8:12 pm #18049614
Andrey WPML Supporter since 06/2013 Languages: English (English ) Russian (Русский ) Timezone: Europe/Kyiv (GMT+03:00)	Thank you for your feedback. I’m glad to hear that the collation issue has been resolved. Please go to WPML → Languages → Site Languages, click on Edit Languages, update the language name as needed, and save the changes. I’ve attached a screenshot for your reference.