Site Restore Replacing Quotes, Apostrophes, Dashes with Other Character

[jhuotari]

I was trying to clean up plugins on our website on Saturday, deactivating and deleting ones I didn't think I needed anymore (maybe four total: VaultPress, Genesis eNews Extended, WordFence Security, and Genesis Tabs). I'm not sure what I did wrong, but for some reason story headlines or titles, as well as meta data, would no longer show up on story pages, category archive pages, or in the Featured Posts widgets on our home page.

We are hosted on Synthesis, and they did a site restore this afternoon, which did restore headlines and meta data. But now we're getting strange characters where quotes, apostrophes, and dashes should be. I checked our archives, and somehow quotes, apostrophes, and dashes have been changed in old stories as well.

Here's an example. The following line should say "Oak Ridge's Mercury Saga" will be discussed at Lunch with the League on Tuesday, March 18, at 12 p.m. Here's what it actually says:

â€?“Oak Ridge’s Mercury Saga” will be discussed at Lunch with the League on Tuesday, March 18, at 12 p.m.

The quotes, apostrophes, and dashes/hyphens have also been changed in the meta description.

I've followed up with Synthesis/Copyblogger to see if they have any idea what would cause this, or if we need to try another site restore.

In the meantime, do any of you know what would cause this?

I could go back and change the characters by hand if I need to, but we have about 4,800 published posts, so that's a very daunting task.

Any recommendations you have will be greatly appreciated. Our website is http://oakridgetoday.com.

Thank you for your time.

http://oakridgetoday.com

[jhuotari]

Never mind. Synthesis/Copyblogger has resolved the issue. I want to thank them for their help.

[Author]

Posts