What Is SSL Certificate Monitoring?
SSL certificate monitoring is an automated check that verifies your website's SSL/TLS certificate is valid, properly configured, and not about to expire. When a certificate expires or becomes invalid, browsers display a security warning that scares visitors away and can break payment forms, API integrations, and login flows.
Why SSL Monitoring Matters
An expired SSL certificate is one of the most preventable and most embarrassing outages a website can experience. Browsers like Chrome and Firefox display a full-page warning that tells visitors the connection is not secure. Most users will immediately leave rather than click through the warning.
For e-commerce sites and SaaS products, an expired certificate can also break Stripe or PayPal payment processing, webhook deliveries, and third-party API calls that require valid HTTPS.
The problem is that certificates expire silently. Your hosting provider or certificate authority sends renewal reminders to an email address that may no longer be monitored. Auto-renewal through Let's Encrypt can fail due to DNS changes, server misconfiguration, or rate limits. Without monitoring, you do not know the certificate is invalid until a customer complains, or until revenue drops.
How PingPing Monitors SSL Certificates
PingPing automatically checks the SSL certificate on every website you monitor. There is no separate toggle or configuration. The moment you add a website to PingPing, both uptime and SSL monitoring are active.
PingPing verifies that the certificate is currently valid (including the full certificate chain) and tracks the expiration date. You can configure when to receive an advance warning: 14, 7, 3, or 1 day before expiry, or only when the certificate has already expired.
What PingPing Checks
Certificate validity - Is the certificate currently valid and trusted by browsers, including the full chain of intermediate certificates?
Expiration date - How many days until the certificate expires? PingPing alerts you at the threshold you choose.
Chain completeness - Is the full certificate chain served correctly? Missing intermediate certificates cause errors on some devices but not others, a frustrating issue to debug without monitoring.
Common SSL Issues PingPing Catches
Certificate expired without anyone noticing, auto-renewal failed silently, intermediate certificate missing from the chain, and certificate issued for the wrong domain after a migration.
For more detail, see our guide: What Is SSL Certificate Monitoring?