Are there any professional website designers here? If so, would you say that 4.5MB for a homepage is excessive? When I analysis many other popular sites, they are under 1MB is size. This new design seems big to me, causing excessive traffic.
I've recently got mine down to 700kB, well pleased!
Quick tips are to minify your CSS and JS (with it being on CDN as much as possible of-course), enable gzip in your htaccess if not already, and to seriously optimise your images.
Quick workflow for images that I follow once I've got the resolution correct:For each image I think about which file type will be best (jpeg/png/gif all have their pros and cons).
Convert colours to colour profile sRGB IEC61966 and then remove the colour profile data from the file.
If jpeg, use the compression until you can see artefacts when zoomed in (normally around 8 I find).
If png, stick it through http://compresspng.com
Then run all images through http://imageoptim.com
I'm guessing poorly optimised images?
If one image is 3.5MB the others are likely to be quite large as well and taking up the majority of your 4.5MB total.
Yours doesn't work?!