It has come to our attention that some of our customers have experienced outages in their website’s services or errors caused by a Sectigo Root certificate expiration on May 30.

For online businesses that take credit card transactions, trust is a huge consideration. You can work hard to perfect your product offering, come up with the best deals, and market until the cows come up, but if people don’t trust you, you can forget about finding success. All your efforts will be pointless if potential customers don’t find your site credible or trustworthy. Trust is so important that it’s even a key SEO factor ranking for Google. 

Here on the SSLs.com blog we’ve talked a lot about the many benefits of having an SSL installed on your site. This blog is no exception. We’ll be focusing on the positive effect an SSL can have on one of the most pivotal areas of Internet marketing today: SEO. 

Commercial SSL certificates are often described in quite simple terms, for the sake of clarity. This is so the basic idea behind them can be understood by everyone, not just those with a web tech background. But when a web browser connects to a website with an SSL certificate, there’s actually a lot going on behind the scenes in order to establish a secure HTTPS connection. Today we’re going to focus on an integral part of that connection: Cipher Suites. 

Let’s answer this question right off the bat: it’s unlikely. Though not impossible, the chances of an SSL certificate itself being hacked is incredibly slim. However, just because you have an SSL installed, that doesn’t mean your website isn’t vulnerable in other areas. Misunderstandings about an SSL being “hacked” tend to come from confusion about what an SSL actually does for a website. Let’s clear up some of that confusion, shall we?

We’ve talked before on this blog about how installing an SSL on your site is a necessity, no matter what kind of site you have. Far beyond just being a requirement of Google Chrome and most major browsers these days, SSL brings an added layer of protection to anyone visiting your website. If your website visitors are also customers or potential customers, then having SSL protection is a no-brainer.

On May 30, 2020, Sectigo’s AddTrust External SHA-1 CA Root will expire. What does this mean and do you need to worry about it? In all likelihood, if you are using a device with up-to-date software, you don't have to worry. However, if you use the specific, aforementioned root, you will need to update applications or installations dependent on it by May 2020 or you may be at risk of outages or having error messages displayed.