Your Website May Display SSL Warnings in Chrome and IE

Does your site use secure connections (SSL certificates)? If it does, your customers may start seeing error messages very soon.

Starting November of 2014 Google will start gradually sunsetting SHA-1 in Chrome, Google's very popular web browser. The handling of SHA-1 SSL certificates will slowly, but drastically, change over the coming months. If this is the type of SSL your website uses and it expires after December 31 of 2015, visitors using Chrome will start seeing scary errors and warning messages when viewing your website. Some business owners may find this annoying, but is is all for a very good reason — security!

Since SHA-1 is now considered insufficient, Microsoft's Internet Explorer is scheduled to start showing error messages after December 31 of 2015. Much later than Google's timetable, but since Chrome dominates most website traffic and their sunsetting of SHA-1 happens first, we recommend not waiting and upgrading your website's SSH now.

Will your website experience this issue?

Good question. To answer that question we've created the following website tool to make checking simple. Enter your website domain in the following form and click “Check".

How do I fix my site?

If the tool above recommends upgrading you will want your web design company to rekey your SLL certificate using SHA-2. Upgrading your sites SSL certificate from is normally very easy. All major certificate issuers will do the upgrade for free, but a technical professional still needs to resubmit the certificate request to the original issuer, download the new certificate, and install it on the website.