Fastenex

Why it matters

Along with the wrong dates below, these are the only items in this report a visitor actually hits today. Four of the seven are on Plan Your Travel — the page that exists specifically to help someone book a hotel for the show. Somebody deciding where to stay clicks “Book your Stay” and gets an error page.

We opened every one of them by hand on 19 August, as an ordinary browser rather than as a scanner, because automated checks report false alarms on hotel and airline sites. These seven are genuinely dead: some return an error, and three no longer have a website at all.

Every one is an address typed into a field in Strapi. None of them needs a developer.

Where to change it

Strapi → the page record → the address field on each link or button

Why it matters

These four tell a visitor something untrue. The show is 6–9 October 2026 at Hall 4, Pavilion 1, Crocus Expo, Moscow, and the header and footer of every page say so correctly. It is the body copy on these four that has been left behind from last year — or, on one page, copied from another ITE show.

None of them needs a developer. Each is a line of text in the page record.

Where to change it

Strapi → the page record → the text block on each page

Why it matters

The title is the blue clickable line in a Google result. The description is the grey text underneath it. Together they are the whole of what someone sees before deciding whether to click you or a competitor.

When those two fields are left empty the site falls back to something else — the page’s internal working name for the title, and the home page’s sentence for the description. That is why five titles currently begin “Form -”, and why 19 pages are all advertising the same sentence about the fastener industry, including the page about visiting and the page about the conference.

Both fields are on the same screen in Strapi, so this is one visit per page rather than two. The wording below is a starting point — please read it over and change anything that does not sound like you.

Where to change it

Strapi → the page record → SEO → Meta Title and Meta Description

Why it matters

Google shows roughly the first 60 characters of a title and cuts the rest. The first of these two is 125 characters, so more than half of it never appears — a reader sees the title stop mid-sentence and has to guess what the article is about.

Changing the Meta Title does not change the headline on the page itself. The article can keep its full headline and still show a shorter, complete title in search results.

Where to change it

Strapi → the article record → SEO → Meta Title

Why it matters

Every visitor downloads these at full size, including on a phone using mobile data. They are the single biggest thing slowing the site down, and page speed is one of the things Google weighs when it decides where to rank you.

The eleven sector photos are the ones worth your time. Each one appears on seven or eight different pages — the home page, About Fastenex, Sectors, Why Exhibit, Indian Exhibitors and its own sector page among them — so replacing eleven files takes about 5.6 MB off eighteen pages at once.

The site cannot shrink them automatically. A smaller file has to be uploaded over the current one, which keeps it in place everywhere it is used.

Where to change it

Strapi → Media Library → replace the file on the existing entry

Why it matters

In the Fastenex Connect section of the home page there is a prominent red button reading “Download the app”. Clicking it does nothing at all — the page simply stays where it is.

The button’s address field currently contains a single # character. That is a placeholder meaning “stay on this page”, and it is what the button is faithfully doing. The button’s text is filled in correctly, which is why the problem is invisible until somebody clicks.

Putting a real address in that field is the whole fix, and it goes live when you publish.

Where to change it

Strapi → Home page → Connect Section → the button’s LinkTo field

Why it matters

On the Why Russia Report and Why India × Russia pages, the line “Download this report to understand:” was typed using the Heading 1 style in the text editor.

Heading 1 is meant for the page’s own main title and nothing else — it is how a search engine works out what a page is about. Using it twice gives the page two competing answers to that question.

Change that one line from Heading 1 to Heading 2 on each page. Nothing about how it looks needs to change, and the rest of the page is untouched.

Where to change it

Strapi → the page record → the text block → change the heading style on that line

Why it matters

There is a second, near-identical version of your Partners and Sponsors page at /partners-sponsors-demo/. It is not linked from any menu, but it is public, it is listed for Google, and its title reads “Partners & Sponsors (Demo)”.

Two pages saying the same thing compete with each other in search, and neither wins outright. It also means a customer can land on a page labelled “Demo”.

Where to change it

Tell us to delete it, or delete it yourself in Strapi

Why it matters

Eight links across four pages point at the ITE exhibitor catalogue, including the “View All” button on the home page. We tried them repeatedly on 19 August and every attempt was refused before the page even loaded.

The whole catalogue site behaves the same way from here, not just those pages — so it is either blocking visitors from outside Russia, or it is refusing everyone. We cannot tell which from where we are.

It matters because Fastenex sells to international exhibitors. If it is a country block, every overseas visitor who clicks that button is turned away.

Where to change it

Try the link from your own office, then tell us what you see

Why it matters

Every page on the site loads a script from OptinMonster, the pop-up and email-capture tool. On all 120 of them it fails, because fastenexexpo.com is not registered as a site in the OptinMonster account.

We checked it directly on 19 August and the answer that comes back is “The referrer site could not be found. It may not have been registered with OptinMonster.”

Nothing is visibly broken — visitors see nothing and no pop-ups appear. But every page downloads and runs the script before discovering it has nothing to do, which is pure weight on every page load. And if anyone has been building campaigns in that account expecting them to run here, they have not been running.

Where to change it

Register the domain in OptinMonster, or tell us to remove the script