Setting “utf8mb4” as Platform Default Site Character Set

Starting on 5 February 2025, the WP Cloud platform will set “utf8mb4” and “utf8mb4_general_ci” as the Atomic API default character set and collation for a site. If db_charset and/or db_collate are not specified during a create-site request, “utf8mb4″/”utf8mb4_general_ci” will be used. Clients are still free to set the database character set and collation of their choice from the available “latin1” and “utf8mb4”, but we’re updating our default to bring it more inline with the expected out-of-the-box WordPress experience.