One of the things that’s often brought to my attention is that people see the ERR_SPDY_PROTOCOL_ERROR whenever they try to access this site.

ERR_SPDY_PROTOCOL_ERROR

I’ve had people respond to links from my newsletter, from links on Twitter, from links from third-party sites, and sharing their experiences when trying to access other sites, too.

The thing is, few people – myself included – seemed to be able to diagnose the problem. (And believe me when I say that I’ve tried a ton of different things to fix it on my end.)

So to the best my ability, I researched the problem, all possible fixes, and thought I’d share what I found here along with the fixes.

ERR_SPDY_PROTOCOL_ERROR

Rather than get into the details of the problem first, why not cover the solution? The gist of it is that it appears to be a problem with Chrome, not the site in question.

That’s not exactly good news, but at least it’s part of the diagnosis. Knowing that it’s something within the software gives us a place so we can stop it from happening.

The Simple Solution

There are a couple of “quick fix” solutions. I’m not a fan of that kind of stuff because it seems more like a bandaid than an actual solution. But if you’re looking for something quick, here’s what I recommend:

  1. Make sure Chrome is updated,
  2. Load the site in an incognito tab or an incognito window

Most of the time, this will allow the site in question to load. But what about permanently fixing the problem?

The Problem in Detail

This is where it gets a little more technical is it has to do with how maintains what it calls its “SPDY Sockets.” Note that SPDY is short for “Speedy” (clever, right?) and that it’s something native to Chrome (which is why we don’t see this in other browsers).

SPDY manipulates HTTP traffic, with particular goals of reducing web page load latency and improving web security. SPDY achieves reduced latency through compression, multiplexing, and prioritization, although this depends on a combination of network and website deployment conditions. The name “SPDY” is a trademark of Google and is not an acronym.

To fix there, there are two things that you can do.

  1. Navigate to chrome://net-internals/#sockets in Chrome and then click on Flush socket pools,
  2. Next, navigate to chrome://net-internals/#dns and click on Click host cache

This should fix the problem within the browser. Unfortunately, you may need to do this periodically because, at the time of this writing, I don’t know nor was I able to find another solution.

Nothing More Than Some Advice

And though this a short post and has nothing to do with WordPress or programming, hopefully, it provides a bit of value for those of you who attempt to browse the web with Chrome and are seeing this error a bit more and more (and I know it happens with this site).