How to Get SSL Certificate Expiry Alerts (Before Your Site Shows Warnings)

There’s nothing quite like discovering your SSL certificate expired because a customer sent you a screenshot of Chrome’s “Your connection is not private” warning.

By then, the damage is done. Visitors are bouncing. Google is flagging your site. And you’re scrambling to figure out how to renew a certificate you forgot existed.

SSL monitoring solves this by tracking your certificate’s expiration date and alerting you before it expires—so you can renew calmly, on your schedule, without any browser warnings or lost customers.

What Happens When Your SSL Certificate Expires

When an SSL certificate expires, browsers immediately start warning visitors that your site isn’t secure. Here’s the cascade of problems:

Why Manual Tracking Fails

Most people try to track SSL expiration manually—a calendar reminder, a spreadsheet, a sticky note. Here’s why that doesn’t work:

You forget to check. A reminder set 12 months ago is easy to dismiss or miss entirely.

Staff changes. The person who set up the certificate might not be the one who needs to renew it.

Multiple sites. If you manage more than one website, keeping track of different expiration dates becomes a mess.

Auto-renewal isn’t foolproof. Even with auto-renewal enabled, payment methods expire, emails go to spam, and things slip through the cracks.

The only reliable solution is automated monitoring that checks your certificate regularly and alerts you with enough time to act.

How SSL Monitoring Works

SSL monitoring tools automatically check your website’s SSL certificate at regular intervals. They track:

Expiration date — When your certificate will expire

Certificate validity — Whether the certificate is properly configured and trusted

Chain issues — Problems with intermediate certificates that could cause warnings

When your certificate approaches expiration—or if something goes wrong—you get an alert via email or SMS. No manual checking required.

Setting Up SSL Expiry Alerts

Here’s how to set up SSL monitoring with SiteRooster:

How Far in Advance Should You Be Alerted?

The best SSL monitoring sends multiple alerts as expiration approaches:

This graduated approach ensures you’re never caught off guard, even if you miss the first notification.

Free vs Paid SSL Monitoring

The free plan is great for keeping an eye on a single site’s SSL status. Paid plans add proactive alerts so you don’t have to remember to check—the tool tells you when action is needed.

Never See That Browser Warning Again

An expired SSL certificate is one of the most preventable problems in website management. With proper monitoring, you’ll always know when expiration is approaching and have plenty of time to renew.

Set it up once, and you’ll never have to worry about SSL expiration catching you off guard again. Your visitors will always see a secure site, and you’ll never scramble to fix an embarrassing security warning.