Now that you have acquired an SSL certificate from your chosen supplier of SSL certificates, and you have presumably installed it on your servers. But the question on your mind may be, how can you make sure it’s properly installed? Read on, I have this detail protected here for you.
For a non-technical or technical user, this is a Do-it-yourself (DIY) guide to ensure that the installed SSL certificate works perfectly without any bugs and according to browser standards.
We have faced several cases where consumers are struggling on their own to mount SSL certificates. But they can find it hard to deploy it correctly as server settings are involved. This was the driving force behind writing this post.
If you are trying to instal an SSL licence, here is a list of SSL software that will be helpful to support you.
Let’s go right to the subject without getting into further details.
Steps for Checking SSL Certificate Installation
1. SSL CA Certificate Chain Confirmation
Certificate chain confirmation can differ depending on the type of server you are using. This guide is drawn up by default for commonly used servers, i.e. Server for Microsoft IIS. (You can try contacting our tech support team via chat support or via the contact us page if you have any other servers)
Go to the installed certificate and click on “Certificate Path”
If you see only one certificate as seen in the above chart, your certificate will not be correctly mounted. Ideally, if your credential is correctly mounted, it will display the entire sequence of certificates as seen in the picture below.
Alternatively, there are many resources available online that can help you do this. Here’s a free SSL Checker tool that can define a chain of credentials, or you can use the SSL Labs tool.
2. Certificate Binding
It is a means of assigning the URL to the SSL certificate. It’s just halfway finished to mount the SSL certificate on your server, so you’ll need to connect this SSL certificate to the correct URL.
You would need to right-click your URL (or website name) under ‘Pages’ to validate this, then click ‘Edit Bindings.’ You should see the image below on your computer, then click “https” and then click “Delete”
By default, “https” would run on port 443, then mention the port if you want to change that port. Ensure that the port you specified is still available, then pick the proper SSL certificate from the drop-down menu.
3. HTTPS Port Checking
You should be able to open the port you listed in the Certificate Binding stage. If it is not opened, browsers can throw different errors such as TCP / IP error, page can not be seen, etc. There are several ways of checking whether or not the port is available. A techy person can do this with Command Prompt, but this is my favourite.
4. DNS “ A ” Record Mapping
You will need to make sure that the URL for which you have purchased an SSL certificate is properly mapped to the public IP on the public DNS site.
Depending on the server form, this guide will run longer, but I have tried to send you the most prominent steps to check the installation of SSL certificates.
If you like this post, share it for the good of other readers. Comment below on the actions you have taken to validate the SSL Certificate installation.