If a webpage ever seems slow, there’s one thing that’s unlikely to be the culprit: its text. Unlike images, videos, or interactive elements, words get encoded into tiny, hyper-efficient packages. War and Peace has more than 560,000 words, but you can cram them all into 3.2 megabytes as plain text. That’s slightly smaller than this picture of a baby monkey. (Online, a picture can be worth a lot more than 1,000 words.)

And with Hurricane Milton bearing down on the Florida coast, it was inevitable that cellular networks would take a beating — just when their connection to critical information is needed most.

So on Wednesday, NPR made a small change in Grove — its content management system that powers more than 200 local stations’ websites — that allowed them to publish bare-bones, text-only versions of their sites. It looks straight out of the mid-1990s web — maybe circa Hurricane Opal — but it loads like a dream when your phone is barely finding a single bar of coverage.

A text-only version is available to all Grove-using stations, but the most important at the moment are in Florida — especially at WUSF in Tampa, the closest public radio station to where Milton made landfall near Siesta Key. I also found text-only sites at Orlando’s Central Florida Public Media, Melbourne’s WFIT, Fort Pierce’s WQCS, Gainesville’s WUFT, and Pensacola’s WUWF. (NPR has offered its own text-only site for years. So have a number of national and global sites, like CNN, the CBC, and the Christian Science Monitor. Even the Daily Mail!)

This morning, loading the main WUSF.org homepage required 8.5 megabytes of bandwidth. The text-only page needed only 21.5 kilobytes. That’s a difference of about 400×.

WUSF’s standard homepage.

Its text-only homepage.

The move mirrored some quick civic-minded action after the last big hurricane, Helene, which devastated parts of western North Carolina. The NC Local News Workshop built a text-only version of several N.C. outlets, including public radio’s Blue Ridge Public Radio and WFDD as well as Asheville Watchdog and Enlace Latino NC. The sites were praised by both readers and public officials. (Credit goes to Shannan Bowen, Mel Kramer (a long-time text-only advocate!), Catherine Komp, Daniel Williams, Kinsey Wilson, Joe Boydston, Tyler Dukes, and Melanie Sill.)

If you're dealing with slow Internet or cell service, we have good news: we just launched a text-light version of our site. There are no images and no ads, which means it loads faster if you have a poor connection. Check it out below.https://t.co/9Z9aax3jPb pic.twitter.com/yyU1bZGL1S

— Blue Ridge Public Radio (@BlueRidgePublic) October 3, 2024

For literally I am not exaggerating everything they need to know right now, my parents are relying on @BlueRidgePublic, which is clearly run by geniuses. https://t.co/VLH1Zdsu3d https://t.co/Oj5zJTCpE7

— Jessie Lazarus (@jessaylaz) October 3, 2024

We understand reception is still limited in our western NC communities. For local news, tell your loved ones to visit @BlueRidgePublic's text-only website: https://t.co/rpBj1zHfvM Also, our office is a resource if you see price gouging or scams. https://t.co/7QF26m4U5N

— NC Attorney General (@NCAGO) October 3, 2024

Kudos to @BlueRidgePublic mot only for its comprehensive hurricane coverage through its own struggles but for putting up a text-only website so those with spotty cell service have essier access to critical info. #helene2024 #Helene24Help #HeleneHelphttps://t.co/1R7uUu5IAO

— Doug Fisher (@dougfisher) October 3, 2024

NPR rolled out the feature Wednesday “to support [stations’] ongoing efforts to serve their local communities with critical information, especially during crises or emergencies,” said Jonathan Butler, NPR’s director of station digital solutions, in a statement. (NPR rolled out Grove to stations starting in 2019, when it replaced an old Drupal-based system.)

Text-only news sites are a niche interest at best in normal times. But a natural disaster is not normal times. (That’s why you’ve seen a thousand stories this week about how to use recent iPhones to text over satellite when cellular networks are down.)