You can solve this by finding ENGINE = InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET = utf8mb4 COLLATE = utf8mb4_unicode_520_ci ; in your .sql file, and swapping it with ENGINE = InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET = utf8 COLLATE = utf8_general_ci ; I believe this is an error that is caused because the local server and live server are running different version of MySQL. To solve this. Open the sql fine in your text editor Find and replace all utf8mb4_unicode_520_ci with utf8mb4_unicode_ci Save and upload to a fresh mySql db Hope that helps In my case it turns out my new server was running MySQL 5.5 , old server was running MySQL 5.6 . So I got this error when trying to import the .sql file I'd exported from my old server. MySQL 5.5 does not support utf8mb4_unicode_520_ci , but MySQL 5.6 does. Updating to MySQL 5.6 on the new server solved collation the error ! If you want to retain MySQL 5.5, you can: - make a copy of your exported .sq