Take a good look at your site. First of all, make sure you are looking at it while connected to the Internet with a 56 KBPS modem or slower. If you are viewing it on your office LAN, while it is cached, or if you're connected to the Internet via ISDN or faster, you will not have a realistic view of how the other 80% of Internet users will see your site.

If you have to wait until you get home to do this, copy the URL in the location: bar above, paste it in an email message and send it to your home email address.

The first thing you should do is clear your cache.

Now, go to your web site, and count the seconds from the time you hit enter to the time the entire page is finished loading. Did it go over 30 seconds? You should do this test both on evenings as well as on the weekend to get an average idea of load times during peak Internet activity. If parts of your site extend past thirty seconds load-time, it will benefit from this service.

Long load times are the first and most common indicator that your web site needs optimization. There are, however, many other elements of your web site you must consider: