How to Turbo-Charge Wordpress with Google Gears
Anyone who runs a blog, and loves Wordpress, is in for a little surprise in the latest WP version. If you log into version 2.6, you will notice a link at the top right of the screen that says “turbo”. Careful, clicking on this link might lead to much faster Wordpress performance than you are used to so far!
How to Turbo-Charge Wordpress
Wordpress Turbo is supported by Google Gears. The difference is apparently most noticeable on slow Internet connections, and it should speed up writing new posts as well as adding photos to posts that are already uploaded to Wordpress. WP Turbo can speed up loading by about 4x what you are used to now.
5 Steps towards WP Turbo-speed
1. Click on the Turbo Link in Wordpress
2. Install Google Gears onto your computer
3. Restart your browser
4. login to Wordpress and click the Turbo link again
5. Click “Enabled Gears” to enable Google Gears with your Wordpress. When you are done, you will see the screen shown in the image at the top of this article.
How it works
Wordpress Turbo uses Google Gears to speed up the loading process. It does this by storing files on your computer, and therefore you are accessing certain files directly from your computer instead of downloading over and over again from the Internet.
Turbo only works on Firefox versions 2 and 3, as well as IE version 6 or 7, and Safari version 3.
Google officially announced Wordpress gearing up a little while ago, but what I found interesting was the comments in the article about using Google Gears to develop web enabled desktop applications. Essentially, Gears helps make web-based information available when offline. But with respect to this WP is using Gears in a non-traditional way. WP Turbo uses Google Gears only to speed up the page loading process, it does not mean you can use or work on your blog while offline. Who knows, maybe that will still come in the future…
Clearly, not everyone notices the Turbo link right away. Have you noticed it? Did you see a difference in performance?
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Loaded Turbo/Gears the first chance I had and sadly, I see no change in performance. It might be more noticeable on a slower connection, perhaps.