So I’m really impressed by how much WordPress has improved the site, but I was curious as to what kind of bandwidth it takes to load the main page. In all honesty it took me a moment to figure out how to measure it. I wasn’t looking to find out the exact number of bits it required; I just wanted to get a ball park estimate.

572 Kilobytes!

That’s over half way to a megabyte, kids!

It makes sense though. The average size of the panel is 65KB, and I do show the five most recent panel comics by default. The rest of the PNG/JPG window dressings round out the remaining KB, with a mere 60 to 80 KBytes to accomodate the formatting, jokes, and other provided texts.

It does make me shudder to think: What would it be like for a person to view my page on a dial-up account. This is a question I hate to ponder. It means my page would take over a minute to fully load on a full speed 56K modem. My DSL allows me to completely load it in under 5 seconds, but this is a luxury line on my end.

I also think about all the things that the WordPress program actually does… It boggles my mind to think about the amount of work and effort that had to go into designing a program that not only looks great on the outside, but backstage it’s got a whole world of its own! I’m surprised they haven’t come up with easily installed themes and custom widgets for the account holders, but that will probably be available sometime next fall or sooner.

Meanwhile I’m just going to be grateful that my site is able to run the software, and that everything is working smoothly.