SSL Checker

Google confirmed HTTPS as a lightweight ranking signal back in 2014. It's a tie-breaker: between two otherwise equal pages, the HTTPS one wins. What matters far more is what happens when SSL is missing or broken. Chrome, Safari, and Firefox all display "Not secure" warnings on http:// pages that collect any form input. Users bounce within seconds. Conversion rates on unsecured checkout pages drop by 60–80%.

Beyond the warning, unsecured pages get pushed down in rankings during core updates, are excluded from some rich results, and — as of 2023 — can be flagged as suspicious by Google Safe Browsing if they load mixed content (secure page loading insecure images or scripts).

Four things: whether the certificate exists at all, whether it's still valid (unexpired), whether it matches the domain name being requested (a cert for example.com won't work on www.example.com without a wildcard), and whether the certificate chain is complete (a missing intermediate certificate breaks trust for some browsers and most search-engine crawlers).

The most common failure we see is expired certificates. Free Let's Encrypt certs auto-renew, but only if the renewal process is working. If your host stopped renewing (usually because of a configuration change), you get 24 hours of warnings before the cert dies and traffic collapses. Check quarterly.

No. Google treats all valid SSL certificates equally, whether they cost $0 (Let's Encrypt, Cloudflare) or $500/year (Extended Validation from a legacy CA). The old "green address bar" that EV certs used to display was removed from Chrome in 2019. For SEO purposes and for the vast majority of sites, a free Let's Encrypt cert is exactly as good as any paid cert. Save the money.