Umlauts / Special Characters Are Not Displayed Correctly

Are German umlauts or special characters displayed incorrectly? Learn how to switch PHP default_charset between UTF-8 and ISO-8859-1 in cPanel.

Fix Broken Umlauts: Change PHP Charset

By default, all of our webhosting plans use the UTF-8 character encoding standard.

Older PHP applications that were built for ISO-8859-1 (Latin-1) may display broken umlauts or special symbols unless the PHP default_charset setting is adjusted.

How to Fix Character Encoding Issues

Log in to your cPanel control panel.
Search for “PHP” in cPanel and click “Select PHP Version”.

Select PHP Version in cPanel Schematic illustration for explanation. The actual interface may differ.

Click on “Options” (or “Switch to PHP options”).

Switching to PHP options in cPanel Schematic illustration for explanation. The actual interface may differ.

Locate the default_charset setting and change it from UTF-8 to iso-8859-1 for legacy applications.

Changing PHP default_charset to iso-8859-1 in cPanel Schematic illustration for explanation. The actual interface may differ.

Changes to your PHP configuration take effect immediately without requiring a server restart.