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.
