Category: SSL

Let’s Encrypt will shorten its default SSL/TLS certificate lifetime from 90 days to 64 days on February 10, 2027. Website owners should review their renewal automation, certificate deployment, and expiration alerts before the change takes effect. In its October 7 announcement, Let’s Encrypt confirmed that certificates issued or renewed from that date will use the shorter lifetime […]

Note: Although the modern protocol is Transport Layer Security (TLS), the industry still commonly refers to TLS certificates as “SSL certificates.” TLS errors can be frustrating because browsers often reduce a complex certificate or handshake failure to a short message such as “Your connection is not private” or “SSL protocol error.” The important thing to understand is that […]

Terminology note: Although these are commonly called SSL certificates, modern public certificates are used with TLS. In this guide, we use “SSL certificate” where it matches common search terminology and “TLS certificate” when discussing the underlying technology. I remember the days when securing a website meant manually generating a Certificate Signing Request (CSR) on a server. […]

If you’ve recently issued a new SSL/TLS certificate and noticed the expiration date is much sooner than expected, you aren’t alone. As of March 15, 2026, the industry has officially moved away from the 398-day (one-year) standard. We have entered a phased “step-down” period mandated by the CA/Browser Forum (Ballot SC-081). This represents one of […]