Replacement Characters appearing – Character encoding issue?

My site suddenly is inserting this character ? into pages and posts. Seems to be happening where an open a, em, or strong tag is inserted.

This site was launched about one month ago, and this issue was not present. In the ensuing month, no new content was added to the site, and no updates were made to the WP core, the theme files (Avada) or any plug-ins. The first step I took was to update all these items, but that did not resolve the problem. The hosting company (Network Solutions) insists they made no changes or updates to the database.

Google indicates it may be a character encoding problem. Does anyone know how problems like these arise and what can be done to fix it?

Issue is happening site-wide, but can be clearly seen in the linked page.

edit:
I did try commenting out:
define(‘DB_CHARSET’, ‘utf8’);
define(‘DB_COLLATE’, ”);
in the wp-config file but that did not resolve the issue, and caused other problems too.

• This topic was modified 6 years, 9 months ago by RLCS2015.

The page I need help with: [log in to see the link]