Reseller or shared hosting providers generally oversell resources, which can make the Wordpress administration panel frustatingly slow at times. Google Gears, a plug-in from Google, essentially offloads some of the processing on the server to your local machine by caching elements of certain Wordpress functions.

Enabling Gears

Simply point your browser at http://gears.google.com/ and download the small executable and run it. It will ask you to restart your browser, which you should do so. Then, log into your Wordpress blog and take a look in the top left of your screen – hit the “Turbo” button, as seen below.

If everything has gone well in the earlier installation of Google Gears, you should see an “Enable Gears” button. Click the button to continue and when the pop-up appears make sure the check-box is enabled and click “Allow”. You’ll have to wait while around 250 files are downloaded to your local machine (you’ll only have to do this once).

You should notice that the “Turbo” button has now disapperred when you return to the Wordpress dashboard – this means that Google Gears is installed and working. I’ve installed Google Gears on all my Wordpress sites and the speed improvement is definately noticeable, especially when my reseller hosting is under heavy load. Google Gears is available for Windows (Firefox and Internet Explorer 6.0+), Mac (Firefox, Safari) and Linux.

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