Solid Central will scan your site to see if it has an SSL/TLS certificate setup, enabling HTTPS. This is important for several reasons.
- It’s not uncommon for someone to set up SSL/TLS for their site and then forget to renew their certificate. Solid Central will scan your site to make sure that the certificate hasn’t expired and will warn you in the Solid Central dashboard if it has expired. We’ll also email you when your certificate is about to expire to help prevent an issue where your sites are no longer accessible because of an expired certificate.
- If your site’s server is compromised for some reason, sometimes the SSL/TLS certificate you have doesn’t match the one that is being shown to the public. For this reason, we also check to see if the site’s SSL/TLS certificate matches the actual site. We, of course, will warn you in the Solid Central dashboard if we detect an SSL/TLS certificate mismatch.
Why is SSL/TLS important?
- In August of 2014, Google announced that they were going to use HTTPS as a ranking signal in their search results. In other words, enabling HTTPS for your site now helps your website to index better in Google’s search results.
- Enabling SSL/TLS on your site greatly increases the security of your site and the internet as a whole.
- Enabling SSL/TLS helps your customers feel safer on your website.
Mismatched SSL Certificate
This means that your website is responding on HTTPS with a certificate that doesn’t match your domain or subdomain. Some hosts enable HTTPS automatically on your site, even if your site isn’t set up to handle this. It is possible that you will get a Mismatched SSL Certificate error without realizing that you have HTTPS enabled. The best course of action is to move forward with setting up SSL/TLS properly on your site to clear this action. If this is not possible for you, simply clicking the “ignore” option on this error in Solid Central will clear the error.
Expired SSL Certificate
This means the SSL/TLS certificate on your site has expired. To solve this problem, you’ll need to request and install a new SSL/TLS certificate on your site through your host.