If you manage a lot of websites and have got SSL certificates for all of them, it is kind of tough to keep a track of every SSL certificate that can fix expired.
In this article, I am going to show you how you can keep a track of all your website SSL certificates so that you can renew them in a timely manner.
Google had made it clear that the SSL is going to be a ranking signal. While it might be an overstatement, a blog post written on Neil Patel’s website states that approximately 2% of the top of one million websites have opted for SSL certificates.
2% might sound low, but over the years a lot more websites are going to pop SSL. You should also if you haven’t got if your site already.
Getting SSL certificates for your website is pretty easy these days, Mowgli all the hosting providers will offer you an option to get SSL certificates for your domain, are you can also get them from your domain registrar.
Also, Where are free to use services available such as Letsencrypt, which is pretty popular, and it is the service that I use on a number my website.
Tutorial for getting let’s encrypt SSL certificates for your website is in my to-do list and I am surely going to post it soon.
But for now, for all the people who are using SSL certificates on their websites, I wanted to write about how you can get alerted when it gets expired.
It would be pretty obvious to think ok there is no need for setting up any kind of system just to get alert for the expiry of SSL certificates since you can manually check your websites every day, or keep a note of the expiration date of the SSL certificates of your website in a calendar.
Even I continued with a similar plan, by checking the websites manually for the expiration of SSL certificates.
But recently I came to realize that one of my websites SSL certificates word expired from last 10 days, I was kind of busy in other activities and I didn’t even check it out until one of my readers messaged me.
Although there are hardly any visitors on the website, but, getting the expiry of the SSL certificate means that the web pages of your website won’t be opening which can impact a lot on the SEO of the website.
Upon doing Google search I came across many services that would alert you why email or SMS.
I am currently using one of the services, that is open source, which means it’s free to use and you can keep a check on the expiry date of SSL certificates for as much as 20 websites with a single email.
Set up SSL Certificate Expiration Alerts
It’s called Certificate Expiry Monitor this is how it looks
Upon submitting with domain names and your email address, you will get separate emails for or confirming the subscription for each domain. Once you have confirmed you will get the confirmation email, along with the dates when you will get an email.
Such as, you will get emails when there are 90 days left for the expiration date and then when there are 60 days left and then there are one month left and so on.
Why you should set up SSL certificate expiration alerts yourself?
The services you can buy SSL certificates from will also to give you the option to get alerts when the SSL certificates expire, and you should always opt for it, it there is no guarantee of getting alerts from them.
Let’s encrypt, the service from where I get the SSL certificates for my websites, also collects emails to alert when the SSL certificates are due for expiration, but I hardly get emails from them and I have found myself in situations where the SSL certificate of my website has already got expired, so I would really recommend you setup and additional alert system for peace of mind.
Most of the services will also so give you the option of auto renewing the SSL certificates, and again, you should opt for it whenever possible, but as I said, sometimes they don’t work because of an outside factory which is not give control, do you need to have the knowledge about the expiration date in advance so that you can work on it in get it fixed.
