I need to increase the speed of my initial page view which is 4mb. My site is AtlantaGaToday and its wordpress running on basic Dreamhost shared server. I am going to try ".htaccess", any other suggestions?
I don't know.. maby you can google it or search at yahhoo.. or something like that.. google is your best friend..
You could cache some stuff, you have wordpress options for that. And also you can compress css and js.
4MB page? I think you need to reconsider the content of that page, images etc. That's huge. The page should never be more then a few hundred KB. Most users close a page after waiting more then 5-10 seconds to load.
hmm .. the page loads for 4~6 seconds for me .. but you try instaling WP super cache and see what hapens