What to do when your SSL certificate expires

Your SSL certificate has one job: prove to a visitor's browser that your site is really your site, and encrypt the connection. When it expires, browsers stop trusting you. Visitors see a full-page security warning instead of your homepage, and most of them leave immediately. Search engines notice too. An expired certificate is a small administrative failure with outsized consequences — and it is almost always preventable.

How expiry happens

Most certificates today are free and auto-renewing — typically every 90 days through Let's Encrypt, handled by your host. Expiry usually means the automation broke quietly: a host migration that did not carry the renewal over, a DNS change that broke the renewal check, a server rebuild nobody finished, or a paid certificate bought years ago and forgotten. Nothing warns you on the site itself until the day it expires.

How to check right now

Click the padlock in your browser's address bar and look at the certificate's expiry date. If it is under a month away and you are not sure renewal is automatic, assume it is not. A free health scan will also show the exact expiry date alongside your other vitals.

How to fix it

First, check your hosting panel: most hosts have an SSL section showing whether auto-renewal is on. If it is on and the certificate is still old, ask your host — the renewal job is failing somewhere on their side. If you manage the server yourself, run your ACME client's renewal (for certbot, that is certbot renew) and check the output instead of assuming it worked. If the certificate was bought manually, buy the renewal and install it through your host's panel, then load the site in a fresh browser session to confirm the warning is gone.

How to never be surprised again

The fix is a warning with enough lead time to act. Thirty days is the right horizon: it leaves room for a host ticket, a DNS fix, or a manual renewal without panic. That is why monitoring tools warn at 30 days rather than on the day — by expiry day, your options are "fix it now" or "lose visitors". Set the warning once, and expiry becomes a routine task instead of an emergency.

Run a free health scan on your domain to see your certificate's expiry date today.