Here's a great article (transcript of a talk, actually) on making small web pages. (Small as in fast-loading and small file sizes.)
What do I mean by a website obesity crisis?
Here’s an article on GigaOm from 2012 titled "The Growing Epidemic of Page Bloat". It warns that the average web page is over a megabyte in size.
The article itself is 1.8 megabytes long.
Here's an almost identical article from the same website two years later, called “The Overweight Web". This article warns that average page size is approaching 2 megabytes.
That article is 3 megabytes long.
On a related note, there's this post at quirksmode:
Pushing the web forward currently means cramming in more copies of native functionality at breakneck speed — interesting stuff, mind you, but there’s just too much of it... I don’t think this is a particularly good place to push the web forward to. Native apps will always be much better at native than a browser. Instead, we should focus on the web’s strengths: simplicity, URLs and reach.