While developing and testing WebDirect it's possible to get a distorted view of performance, since during development you are often testing on a super fast LAN network.  

I've found Tor and the Tor Browser to be very useful for doing "real world" testing.    Tor is a privacy system which sets up a virtual circuit which routes your packets across the world, and with a single click of the button you can change to a new random route.   This gives you a browser which is often slow and with packets originating from a different country, thus making a great way to test what other people might be seeing on your website.

 

One disadvantage is that Tor Browser is FireFox based, and WebDirect doesn't really like FireFox (perhaps this is actually a feature as well?)

 

https://www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser.html.en

 

 

What you are really looking for is something that will actually throttle your bandwidth under your control: http://www.soliantconsulting.com/blog/2014/08/performance-tool-network-link-conditioner

There are similar tools available for Windows, but the names escape me so you'll have to google it,

Tor will not give not give you want you want because you can not "set the stage" so to speak.

Thanks, Wim: I think both techniques have their utility.   Tor can give you packet routing (randomly) from anywhere in the world, whereas the tool you recommend does not do that (but as you point out, gives you much better control over latency & bandwidth).  

I think all three variables (bandwidth, latency, routing) are important.