I’m having trouble with my website deployment. The HTML content shows up fine but the CSS styling and JavaScript functionality are completely broken. I’ve tried hosting on both GitHub Pages and Netlify but getting the same issue on both platforms. The website loads but looks unstyled and none of the interactive elements work. I’ve checked several forum posts about similar problems but I can’t figure out what mistake I’m making. The file structure seems correct to me and everything works perfectly when I test it locally on my computer. Has anyone faced this kind of deployment issue before? What could be causing the stylesheets and scripts to fail loading only in production?
sounds like a path issue. check if ur CSS/JS links use relative paths without leading slashes - try ./style.css instead of /style.css. also double-check your file names match exactly since GitHub Pages is case-sensitive (unlike windows).
Your hosting platform might be messing with how files get served. GitHub Pages and Netlify can be really picky about file extensions and MIME types. I’ve hit this when CSS files had wrong character encoding or hidden characters in file paths. Re-upload your CSS and JS files with UTF-8 encoding. Also check for mixed content issues - if you’re on HTTPS but linking to HTTP assets, that’ll break things. Make sure your repo settings point to the right deployment branch. Sometimes these platforms don’t copy all files during build, especially stuff buried in subdirectories.
This happens way too often. I’ve watched teams burn weeks on file path mismatches and MIME type problems.
Stop fighting with static hosting - automate your deployment instead. Build a workflow that checks file paths, catches missing assets, and handles deployment the same way every time.
I made one for our team using automation workflows. It watches our local dev structure, fixes paths for production, validates CSS and JS files work, and pushes to multiple platforms at once.
No more path guessing or case sensitivity headaches. The automation sorts GitHub Pages subdirectories, Netlify redirects, and catches encoding issues before they wreck your site.
You don’t need to code this. Takes 30 minutes to set up, saves hours every deployment.
hey, clearing the cache helped me too! sometimes the old files get stuck. also make sure your index.html is chilling right at the root level, not in some folder. that’s often a sneaky issue!
Check your browser’s developer console - you’ll probably see 404 errors for CSS and JS files. Your HTML paths don’t match where the files actually live after deployment. I ran into this exact issue on my first project. My assets were in a subfolder, but the HTML was still looking for them in the root directory. Also double-check that your repo name matches the URL structure. GitHub Pages creates a subdirectory based on your repo name, which trips people up.