SSL Certificate Problems: What to Check When Your HTTPS Is Broken

Your site has an SSL certificate. Chrome shows the padlock. Everything's fine, right? Maybe. Certificate issues often develop silently: approaching expiration, chain problems, weak algorithms, misconfigured SANs. By the time you notice, visitors are seeing warning pages and leaving. What an SSL check reveals A thorough SSL check examines: Certificate validity period : When was it issued? When does it expire? Let's Encrypt certificates expire after 90 days. Commercial certificates after 1-2 years (the max is now 398 days per CA/Browser Forum rules). Expiration is the most common SSL failure. Set up automated renewal and monitoring. Certificate chain : Your server needs to send not just its own certificate but the intermediate certificates that chain up to a trusted root CA. Missing intermediate certificates cause validation failures in some browsers and devices while working fine in others (because some browsers cache intermediates). Subject Alternative Names (SANs) : The domains listed