On 7 November 2026 I added analytics to my store and rewarded myself by breaking the entire site's text. Every word on every page rendered as garbled symbols in my browser. The build was fine. The files were fine. The words were fine, somewhere underneath whatever my browser had decided they were.

The site is a small store built with Astro, deployed on Vercel. The change that morning was tiny and boring: install Vercel Analytics, drop the component into the base layout, deploy. The kind of change you make between sips of tea.

Then I opened the store and it looked like the text had been fed through a paper shredder and reassembled by an enemy.

What I checked first (all wrong)

I checked the content files. Clean. I checked the build output locally. Clean. I rebuilt. I stared at fonts, because garbled text feels like a font problem the way a cough feels like a lung problem.…