Is your TLS certificate valid?
Whether the certificate your site presents is valid, trusted by browsers, matches your domain and is not about to expire.
Why it matters
A broken certificate puts a full-page warning in front of every visitor, and most people leave at that point. An expiring one is a problem waiting for a date: if renewal fails quietly, your site goes from fine to unusable overnight.
How a survey checks it
Passive check: part of every free survey.
We read the certificate your server presents during the normal secure connection, the same one every browser sees. We flag a certificate that expires within 14 days, and more urgently within 3 days. Short-lived certificates that renew themselves often are expected to look close to expiry, so we do not flag those.
How to fix it
- Let your host or a service such as Let's Encrypt issue and renew the certificate automatically, and check that renewal is switched on.
- Make sure the certificate covers every name you use, for example both your-app.com and www.your-app.com.
- If you use your own server, install the full certificate chain, not only your site's certificate.
Prefer us to do it? Ask for a fix quote
Common questions
What is the difference between SSL and TLS?
TLS is the modern name for what used to be called SSL. People still say "SSL certificate", but every secure site today uses TLS.
Why does my certificate work in my browser but fail the check?
Your browser may have filled in a missing part of the certificate chain from an earlier visit. Other browsers and apps will not, so a chain that is incomplete on the server still causes warnings for some visitors.