.

 Step 1) Open the ‘wp-config.php’ file in a text editor such as notepad (the wp-config.php file can be found on the directory where you installed WordPress).

Step 2) Find the following two lines and comment them out:

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

They should look like the following after you comment them out:

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

Step 3) Now upload the updated ‘wp-config.php’ file to your web host (overwriting the old one).

This character encoding problem can happen after a database upgrade  too so it doesn’t hurt to keep this trick in your mind just in case.