Feature Guide

Security Certificate Monitoring

Never let the padlock lapse.

Your website’s security certificate is what puts the padlock in the browser bar and the “s” in https. It is also the one part of your website with an expiry date. When it lapses, visitors do not see a small warning — they see a full-page red screen telling them your site is unsafe, and most of them leave immediately. It is one of the few problems that turns a working website into an actively harmful one overnight.

Most certificates renew automatically these days, which is exactly why expiries still catch people out: the renewal quietly fails months after anyone last thought about it, and nobody finds out until the site is already showing warnings. Crafty Meerkat checks your certificate every hour and emails you while there is still plenty of time to act — at 30 days, 14 days, 7 days, and 1 day remaining.

You can also see the current status any time on your Site Profile page. The HTTPS check shows how many days are left and who issued the certificate, turning amber under 30 days and red under 14.

How it works

We open a secure connection to your website exactly as a browser would and read the certificate it presents, which tells us the expiry date and the issuer. Nothing is installed and no access to your server is needed — this is public information that every visitor’s browser reads too.

Alerts are sent once per threshold rather than once per check, so you get four well-spaced warnings rather than a daily nag. If the certificate is renewed, the record resets automatically and the next expiry gets its own fresh set of warnings.

Step by step

1
Check the current status
Open Site Profile and look at the HTTPS row in SEO Health. It shows the days remaining and the certificate issuer.
2
Make sure the alerts can reach you
Warnings go to your account email. Add the sender to your contacts so a certificate warning never lands in spam.
3
When a warning arrives, find out who renews it
Most hosting providers renew certificates automatically — check that the renewal actually ran. If you manage it yourself, run your renewal now. If you are not sure which applies, your hosting support team will know in a minute.
4
Confirm the fix
After renewing, the days-remaining figure on Site Profile jumps back up on the next check. That is your confirmation.

Tips from the den

◆A certificate warning is not an emergency until it is. Thirty days is plenty of time to raise a support ticket; one day is not. Act on the first warning, not the last.
◆If a warning arrives and you believe the certificate auto-renews, that is the most important one to investigate — an auto-renewal that has stopped working is exactly the failure nobody notices.
◆You can switch certificate warnings off per site in Settings → Email Alerts, though we would keep them on. The monitoring continues either way.

See it live — no signup

The demo dashboard runs on a real site with real traffic.

Open the live demo →

Common questions

What actually happens if my certificate expires?

Browsers stop trusting your site and show a full-page security warning instead of your content. Visitors have to click through a scary interstitial to continue, and the overwhelming majority will not. Search engines also flag the site.

I use Let’s Encrypt and it renews itself. Do I need this?

That is the most common reason people get caught out. Automatic renewal is a script that can fail silently after months of working — a changed DNS record, an expired API token, a moved file. The alert is there for the day the automation stops and nobody notices.

How often do you check?

Every hour. You are warned at 30, 14, 7 and 1 days remaining, and once more if the certificate has already expired.