How to Fix the ERR_SPDY_PROTOCOL_ERROR in Chrome?

Months of constructing the ideal site. You optimise your SEO. You launch your paid ads. At last, traffic begins to flow. However, rather than being greeted with your highly converting landing page, your visitors are greeted with a grey screen with a message that is not very understandable: ERR_SPDY_PROTOCOL_ERROR.

They don’t wait for it to load. They bounce. And then you lose revenue. Technical faults are not IT frustrations; they are death killers of the conversion. In case your users are not connected, their conversion is impossible. It is that simple.

The good news? It is normally a client connectivity problem. That is, the issue is usually in the browser and not in your server. You do not have to redesign your site.

I will demonstrate to you just how to troubleshoot this and get back your traffic.

What Is ERR_SPDY_PROTOCOL_ERROR?

The first thing that you need to do to fix the problem is to understand the language that your browser is speaking.

ERR_SPDY_PROTOCOL_ERROR is a network communication failure. It occurs when Google Chrome attempts to establish a safe connection to a webpage, and the negotiation is unsuccessful.

The irony is in the following: SPDY (Speedy) is technically dead.

Google invented SPDY in 2009 in an attempt to make the web blazing. It was implemented to minimise the latency and enhance the security.

Later, it turned out to be successful and became the modern standard of HTTP/2. A long time ago, Google abandoned SPDY, and it is not used by contemporary browsers.

Also Read: How to Fix the SEC_ERROR_EXPIRED_CERTIFICATE?

4 Ways to Fix the ERR_SPDY_PROTOCOL_ERROR

Flush Socket Pools

The majority of guides advise you to reboot your computer. That is a waste of time.

In my case, this is roughly 80 per cent of these errors that happened due to a stuck connection in the internal plumbing of Chrome. Chrome maintains communications (sockets) to accelerate browsing. When one of those sockets becomes corrupted or retains old sets of instructions, you are given the SPDY error.

You need to flesh them out. The following is the specific procedure that works with most individuals:

• Open a new tab in Chrome.
• Paste the following URL in the address bar: chrome://net-internals/#sockets.
• Hit Enter.
• You will find there is a menu with a few options. Press the button with the label Flush socket pools.

You do not get a success message. The button just clicks.

After doing that, go back to the broken webpage and refresh the page. To a great majority of you, the site will load immediately. It only had to ensure that the browser was coerced into coming to a new handshake.

Test Identity Data Staleness

Should flushing sockets fail, you may have been corrupting your local data, i.e., cookies and cache files that define your session. Test it before wiping all of it. Open Incognito Window (Ctrl + Shift + N).

When the site loads flawlessly in Incognito mode, then you are certain the problem is specific to your primary browser profile. Probably it is a cookie or a file that is cached. You need to clean it up:

• Click on Settings >  Privacy and Security > Clear browsing data.
• Select the Advanced tab.
• Set the time range to All time.
• Check Cookies and other site data, and Cached images and files.
• Secret Hack: Uncheck Passwords. No login information needs to be wiped due to a protocol error.
• Click Clear data. This causes Chrome to fetch new resources and start a new session key with the server.

Disabling Antivirus

It is an invisible offender that traps many users of an enterprise. Contemporary security software (such as that of Avast, Bitdefender, or AVG) has a feature known as HTTPS Scanning or Web Shield.

The antivirus does this to defend you by intercepting your web traffic, decrypting it to scan it against malware before encrypting it to transmit it to your browser. It is literally a Man-in-the-Middle.

In some cases, the antivirus will corrupt the re-encryption or utilise an outdated protocol that is not accepted by Chrome. Chrome interprets this spoiled traffic, believes it is an attack, and throws the ERR_SPDY_PROTOCOL_ERROR.

This can be tested by temporarily disabling your antivirus Web Shield. In case the site loads instantly, you have discovered the problem. You do not need to turn off your antivirus permanently; all you need to do is go to the settings and add that particular site to either the Exceptions list or the “Allow” list.

Update Your Browser

I understand this may sound self-evident, yet it does matter. Web standards change fast. Chrome has had five months pass since its launch, so you may lack essential support for newer HTTP/2 implementations.

Click on Help > About Google Chrome. In case there is an update in progress, allow it to complete and press Relaunch. This would make sure that you are not shaking hands without reason just because your browser uses an archaic dialect.

Conclusion

Hopefully, by following the above steps, you have resolved this error successfully. Moreover, Power your site with CheapSSLWEB’s Wide Range of Trusted SSL/TLS Certificates.