Special characters appearing broken for multiple CMS after latest cPanel update.

If you are encountering an issue on our cPanel server with CloudLinux Installed, where Swedish characters like å, ä, and ö are appearing as broken or garbled symbols (e.g. Ã¥, ä, �) or any special characters appearing broken in WordPress.

or
the mysqli PHP extension is causing 503 and “SQLSTATE[HY000] [2019] Can’t initialize character set UTF8” error with systems using CloudLinux

You can fix this error by PHP extensions to switing nd_* extensions for affected sites as –

mysqli to nd_mysqli
pdo_mysql to nd_pdo_mysql
mysql to nd_mysql

This should fix all the broken special characters appearing issue with your WordPress website.

Conclusion:

Switching to the nd_* PHP extensions (like nd_mysqli, nd_pdo_mysql, and nd_mysql) resolves the character encoding and 503 errors commonly seen on CloudLinux systems. This fix ensures proper display of special characters such as å, ä, and ö in WordPress and restores full functionality to affected websites.