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A valid SSL/TLS certificate: Crawl Audit check 141

Crawl Audit check 141 confirms your site has a valid, trusted SSL/TLS certificate. What browsers show without one, and how to get one free.

Zain Kazmi2 min read
On this page
  1. What Crawl Audit checks
  2. What the sources say
  3. Getting one
  4. On devmarde.com
  5. Sources
Check
141 of 200
Module
Security & Infrastructure
Group
SSL/TLS & Encryption Standard
Impact
High

Short answer: a certificate lets a browser confirm it's really talking to your site and encrypt everything in between. Without a valid one, Chrome shows a full-page warning before visitors ever see your page. Check 141 connects to your domain and checks that the certificate is trusted.

What Crawl Audit checks

  • Pass: the certificate is valid and trusted. The report shows who issued it.
  • Fail: the certificate isn't trusted (for example expired, issued for a different name, or self-signed). The report gives the reason.
  • If the connection details can't be read, the check passes as long as the site loads over HTTPS, and fails if it doesn't.

What the sources say

  • Google Chrome Help: "If you get a full-page error message saying "Your connection is not private," then there's a problem with the site, the network, or your device."
  • Let's Encrypt: "We do not charge a fee for our certificates."
  • Google announced HTTPS as a ranking signal in 2014. Its current page experience guide says that beyond Core Web Vitals, other page experience aspects "don't directly help your website rank higher". Get a certificate because browsers warn people away without one, not for rankings.

Getting one

  • Check your hosting dashboard first. Many hosts and CDNs issue and renew a free certificate for you.
  • On your own server, an ACME client such as Certbot gets a free certificate from Let's Encrypt and renews it.
  • Make sure it covers every name you use, usually both example.com and www.example.com.

Once it's in place, check 142 watches the expiry date and check 145 makes sure plain http:// visits are sent to HTTPS.

On devmarde.com

Our certificate is from Let's Encrypt, valid from 14 September to 13 December 2026 when we checked on 6 October. It passes.

Sources

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