Try creating a .htaccess file in your htdocs folder with the line I mentioned above and see if that fixes your website’s encoding. The web server is not checking the meta tags when serving your files, so if you do not specify the charset it will use the default, which here is UTF-8.
You are probably trying to edit the .htaccess file that is outside of htdocs. That file should have a big “DO NOT EDIT THIS FILE” line at the beginning; you need to create a new file inside your website’s htdocs folder, name it .htaccess, and then add the line to it.