The Nightmare Scenario
It's Monday morning. Your client calls panicking: "The website doesn't work! There's an error message!"
You open the site and see it: "Your connection is not private". Your SSL certificate has expired.
This happens more often than you think, and the consequences are significant:
- Customer trust - Visitors leave immediately
- SEO impact - Google penalizes expired certificates
- Revenue loss - No one buys on an unsafe site
- Reputation damage - Your brand gets associated with unreliability
How Does This Happen?
SSL certificates expire for security reasons. Certificates are valid for a maximum of 13 months (since 2020 this was still 39 months). But in practice:
- Too many domains - How do you keep track of dozens or hundreds of domains?
- Too little visibility - Certificates don't proactively notify you
- Auto-renewals fail - due to DNS issues, configuration errors, provider problems or payment issues
- Wildcard certs forgotten - *.yourdomain.com is easy to forget
- Development domains - Test and staging environments get forgotten
An SSL certificate that worked yesterday can suddenly expire today. And the worst part: your customers are the first to notice, not you.
The Risks
An expired certificate is more than just a browser warning:
- Man-in-the-Middle attacks - Without a valid certificate, attackers can intercept traffic
- Data integrity - Your visitors can no longer guarantee they're communicating with your server
- Browser warnings - Modern browsers show increasingly aggressive warnings
- PCI Compliance - For webshops, an expired certificate can mean PCI non-compliance
The Solution
Monitor everything! I always recommend:
- Automatic alerts - At least 30, 14, and 7 days before expiration
- Multiple notification channels - Email + Slack + SMS for criticals
- Historical overview - Which certificates do we have, which need renewing soon?
- Auto-renew where possible - Let your CA automatically renew
- Check development too - All domains, including test.yourdomain.com
That's why I built CertGuard — it automatically monitors all my certificates and warns me well before anything expires. No more sleepless nights over expiring SSL certificates.
Quick Win
Check all your domains today:
# Check expiration date
echo | openssl s_client -connect yourdomain.com:443 -servername yourdomain.com 2>/dev/null | openssl x509 -noout -dates
Or use an online SSL checker to quickly check all your domains.
See anything expired or expiring soon? Fix it now, before your customers notice. An expired SSL is an easily preventable problem with big consequences.
More tips about SSL and security? Get in touch or try CertGuard for automatic certificate monitoring.