Let’s Encrypt is a free, automated, and open certificate authority (CA), run for the public’s benefit. It is a service provided by the Internet Security Research Group (ISRG).
They give people the digital certificates they need in order to enable HTTPS (SSL/TLS) for websites, for free, in the most user-friendly way we can. We do this because we want to create a more secure and privacy-respecting Web.
If you are using the free Let’s Encrypt ssl certificate for your site, I expect you to be aware that it expires every 90 days. While some web hosting companies auto renew letsencrypt for you, some don’t. If your web hosting company doesn’t auto renew it for you, you can renew it manually by yourself.
The free Letsencrypt ssl certificate which I generated from sslforfree.com and installed on one of my WordPress sites hosted on Namecheap expired yesterday and I’ve been able to renew it successfully.
I renewed it manually because as at the time of publishing this post, Namecheap doesn’t offer one-click installation of letsencrypt ssl certificate via cPanel.
Here are the steps :
1. Generate new free ssl certificate for the site at sslforfree.com
2. Uninstall and delete the expired letsencrypt certificate from cPanel (Security > ssl/tls > Manage SSL Sites)
3. Install the new ssl certificate in cPanel as explained here.
And we are done.
