We audited our own website and found 45 buttons that went nowhere

I spent a day going through agrivisionai.org line by line, the way a stranger would. Here is the honest list.

45 “Contact us” buttons across 23 pages pointed at /#contact. That anchor does not exist. The contact form had moved to its own page months ago during a restructure, and the links were never updated. Every one of those buttons quietly dropped the visitor at the top of the homepage — including from our highest-intent product page.

Nobody reported it. Nothing errored. It just silently leaked every person who tried to reach us.

Our robots.txt blocked /_next/ — which, in a Next.js site, is where 100% of the CSS and JavaScript lives. Text still indexed because our pages are prerendered, but Google’s render pass was seeing a page with no styling at all. We had been shipping a site we thought looked good to a crawler that could not see any of it.

One line.

We generate a social preview image per blog post. For the Hindi posts, the Devanagari rendered as non-words: “ड्रिप सिंचाई” came out as “ड्रपि सचिाई” — the vowel mark drawn after its consonant instead of before, the nasal dropped entirely.

Worse, I had checked this. I opened one of the generated images, saw Devanagari glyphs instead of empty boxes, and concluded it worked. But glyphs appearing is not the same as text being shaped correctly, and the one card I checked happened to contain no reordering. I then assumed a missing font, embedded a Devanagari typeface, rebuilt — and the mis-shaping was identical. The image generator simply does not reorder Indic scripts. No font fixes that.

Hindi cards now use the English twin’s title. A readable English card beats a garbled Hindi one, and the page behind the link is still Hindi.

I had been assuming we did not rank for our own name — six other companies use “AgriVision AI”. Search Console says otherwise: position 3.7 for our brand, 110 clicks and 2,090 impressions in three months.

The split that matters:

India sees us 2.6x more than the US and clicks 6x less. One Hindi post has 436 impressions and 1 click. We are ranking fine in India and losing almost everyone at the search result. That is a headline-and-description problem in Hindi, not a ranking problem, and it is now the most valuable thing on my list.

Verification that cannot fail is not verification. I looked at that Hindi image and saw what I expected to see. The check that would have caught it was reading all six, not one.

And the expensive bug was not exotic. It was a link that used to work.

If you are building in public too: go click your own buttons.