How can I decrease my page sizes?

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

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  Chris M Cloutier: I recently did a free SEO test on Neil Patel's site.  ;It told me one of my problems is that my page size is too big.  ;I guess 500-kb is best and 'm at 1.3-mb.  ;How can I decrease this?
  
  I'm using wordpress and it's not like I have tons of images on the page.  ;In fact I was hoping to go back and add images to some of the older posts.  ;Any help is appreciated.  ;Thanks
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  Brent Wildman: It's hard to say without seeing your site, but every plug in and add on you have adds to the load time. ;
  
  There are tons of things you can do to decrease load time. Check out what Google says here ;https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/
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  Chris M Cloutier: So when they say page size, they really mean load time.  ;Is that right? +Brent Wildman ;
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  Brent Wildman: In a sense yes. ;
  
  You could have a website that's physically larger i.e. 1.5 mb's but loads faster than a smaller site i.e. 1.2 mb's. It comes down to a multitude of factors. CMS, your framework, javascript jquery, plug ins, widgets, servers speed, response time, .htaccess, css. ;
  
  There are hundreds of variables, but Google gives you a good starting point on where to start trimming the fat.
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  Mike Stetzer: +Chris M Cloutier ;, are you using the Facebook API on your page? We found that the Facebook API was really affecting our page load times.
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  Chris M Cloutier: Thanks +Brent Wildman ;  ;That makes sense.  ;I'' be reading over the link you sent to see where I can trim down a little.
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  Chris M Cloutier: +Mike Stetzer ;Yes, I am.  ;I use it along with the jetpack plugin for wordpress.  ;Everyone told me to drop jetpack but when I did, I noticed no difference.  ;But when I did that I found another way to keep using the facebook API.  ;So maybe thats part of the problem.  ;Thanks
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  Hoang Lo: I don't think that tool is that useful 
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  Chris M Cloutier: +Hoang Lo ;I wondered myself and I'd say you're probably right.  ;The thing that got my attention was the term "Page Size"
  
  It acted like it was a file or something and I didn't understand that.  ;I mean I guess it is a file that needs to be downloaded, I'm just not that savvy about this kinda stuff.
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  Unique Websites: +Chris M Cloutier ;Check out http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/ to get an idea as to how your site is loading and where the bottlenecks are - also they have an option to see how your server is doing.
  
  As said, plugins often slow down loading time - so weed out any unnecessary ones, sepecially any you haven't deactivated or deleted.
  
  Then install w3cache plugin (or equivalent) to get server and browser caching (this massively helped our sites although one of the options on it had to be disabled as it caused problems with the image editor; however, even with that option disabled, it still reduced our loading time).
  
  Install smushit plugin  ;to reduce the size of your images without losing quality.
  
  There is also a plugin (sorry, can't remember its name) that deletes old versions and revisions of each page (for old sites with lots of revisions this can reduce your database size) - be warned that when I used this it worked great but I did lose editing access to some images as some sort of strange side-effect.
  
  I've also read that some of the php code Wordpress uses (eg php for image paths) can slow down loading time - whereas simple html for an image path can decrease it slightly; someone will correct me I'm sure if that's not accurate.
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  Chris M Cloutier: +Unique Websites ;I have removed the revision from my blog.  ;I have it set to only save 3 and wordpress autodumps every 10 days instead of 30 or whatever it was by default.
  
  I wasn't sure about W3cache maybe I'll look into it again.  ;Thanks for the resource, I'm checking it out now.
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  Unique Websites: +Chris M Cloutier ;w3cache was the plugin that made the most difference for our sites as it reduced that ;killer ;"time to first bite" shown in pingdom; if you're not happy with w3cache there are similar ones (eg totalcache I think).
  
  Other plugins (for us) just gave us the "icing on the cake" although I would checkout Sumshit or equivalent for images.