Store Text Garbled After Analytics Install Due to Late Charset Declaration

On 7 November 2026, a developer added Vercel Analytics to their Astro-built store, and afterward every word on the site rendered as garbled symbols. The source files and build output were correct, so the problem lay elsewhere in how the served page was read. The analytics component injected a script ahead of the charset meta tag, pushing it to byte offset 3,410 in the served HTML. Browsers only scan roughly the first 1,024 bytes for a charset declaration, so they ignored it, and with no charset in the response headers they guessed the wrong encoding. Moving the charset tag to the top of the head, at byte offset 44, restored the text, and the developer now checks how bytes are interpreted before inspecting content.
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