webpage displaying as random characters

Hey Meghanadi

There is a possibility your wp-config.php file isn’t working correctly. Have you changed databases or made adjustments to your site recently? And when was the last time it was working right? From looking at it, the character encoding seems completely off on the database end or in your config file.

Can you access your website dash?

James

We haven’t changed databases or made any adjustments recently, I don’t check it everyday so it’s hard to know exactly when this happened, but it was working last week. I can’t access the dashboard. Do you know how to fix the character encoding?

If you check your wp-login.php page, you’ll note that the characters are being sent prior to the actual page output. Please check your PHP error log to see if an error is causing the extraneous characters to be sent. If not, then you should do a malware scan on your site.

Found this in my error log “php fatal error: call to undefined function is_404()”

If there was only one instance of that error, then it likely has nothing to do with this issue.

If you have the ability to restart PHP and Apache, you should do that. If you are using a cache application such as Memcached or Varnish, you should restart those as well. If the problem persists, then we can rule out cache corruption.

If you have some familiarity with FTP, I’d suggest checking the last-modified dates on the files in the wp-includes, wp-content/plugins, wp-content/themes, and wp-admin directories. The WordPress, theme, and plugin core .php files in a directory should all ahve the same last-modified date. If one or more are different, that’s a possible indication of the file being hacked.

Otherwise I’d suggest running a malware check.

Morning!

To check if there is a problem with you encoding check your wp-config.php file in your hosting directory where WordPress is installed. Download it and use a text editor to open it up.
https://codex.www.ads-software.com/Editing_wp-config.php

Find these two lines and add // to the beginning of them to comment them out.
define(‘DB_CHARSET’, ‘utf8’);
define(‘DB_COLLATE’, ”);

They should look like this:
//define(‘DB_CHARSET’, ‘utf8’);
//define(‘DB_COLLATE’, ”);

Reupload that to your WordPress files on your host and overwrite the old one.

This might help with the encoding error, let us know if you’re making any progress!

Cheers,

James