The SSL certificate on your website is what puts the padlock in the address bar and lets browsers load it over HTTPS. Every certificate has an expiry date, and that date is coming round much more often than it used to.
What’s changed
In April 2025 the CA/Browser Forum, the group of certificate authorities and browser makers that sets the rules for SSL certificates, voted to shorten how long they can last. The change is happening in three steps:
- From 15 March 2026: up to 200 days (down from 398).
- From 15 March 2027: up to 100 days.
- From 15 March 2029: up to 47 days.
The first step is already in place, so any certificate issued since March lasts 200 days at most. Certificates issued before then keep their original expiry date. The checks that prove you own your domain are getting shorter too, and by 2029 they can only be reused for 10 days.
Why it’s happening
Shorter certificates limit the damage when something goes wrong. If a certificate’s private key is stolen or a certificate is issued by mistake, it stops working within weeks instead of lasting more than a year. It also pushes the whole web towards automation, so security changes can be rolled out quickly.
What it means for you
If someone buys a certificate once a year and installs it by hand, that job now comes round about twice a year, and by 2029 it will be roughly every six weeks. Sooner or later someone forgets. When a certificate expires, visitors get a full-page browser warning telling them the site isn’t secure, and most of them leave.
The answer is to stop renewing certificates by hand. Free certificate authorities such as Let’s Encrypt already issue short-lived certificates that renew automatically using a standard called ACME. Most good hosting supports it, and once it’s set up, renewals happen in the background without anyone needing to remember them.
On our hosting
We set up SSL on every site we host from day one, with automatic renewal, so these changes won’t affect you. If your site is hosted elsewhere and you still renew your certificate by hand, now is a good time to change that, and we can help.
