What is SPDY?

SPDY (pronounced: speedy) was a network protocol developed by Google to improve the speed of website loading. It was first published in 2009 and introduced as an experiment. The protocol was later refined and released in 2012 as SPDY 3.1.

SPDY was developed to reduce webpage loading times by introducing several optimizations and improvements over the HTTP/1.1 protocol, which was still widely used at the time. One of the most important optimizations was the introduction of multiplexing, which provided the ability to send multiple HTTP requests and responses simultaneously over a single TCP connection.

In 2015, SPDY was replaced by the new HTTP/2 protocol, which inherited many of SPDY's features. Today, SPDY is no longer actively developed or supported as HTTP/2 is the preferred protocol for website speed optimization.