After requesting and installing SSL certificate, “Expiration date” under " Step 4: Install SSL certificate" section is showing the new expiry date for the requested SSL certificate, but the " Step 5: Verify Installation" section is still showing the old expiry date. I have pressed “Install SSL certificate automatically” but it seems that installation is failing. Is it possible to know to solve this?
Thank you for your comment. The thing is that I have requested a new SSL but whenever I press “Install SSL certificate automatically” it shows me that it can take 15 minutes to update the certificate but nothing happens. In the attached screenshot, it shows that the requested SSL is available but not installed and didn’t replace the one that will expire in July. I would like to note that I have another website that I have updated its SSL recently with no problem. The only difference between the two is that this website (hachemengineering.com) has a cloudflare setup. Could this be the reason for this happening? and if so, how can I solve it?
The SSL installation checker shows the status of the SSL certificate that’s currently being used on your website. If you use Cloudflare, it will show the status of your Cloudflare certificate, not the status of whatever certificate is installed on your hosting account.
The way to “solve” it would be to stop using Cloudflare. But I think it’s probably more useful to just accept that this is how the SSL installation status works than drop Cloudflare because of this.
What may also be useful: if you go to Accounts → (your account) → SSL Certificates → (your domain) → Manage, then you’ll see the “Installed SSL Status” alongside the “Live SSL Status”. That way, you can verify see certificate is currently installed on your hosting account.
Thank you for your detailed comment.
I have checked the page in my account that you have mentioned (shown in the screenshot). Is it safe to assume based on the info in the screenshot that the SSL will switch automatically to the new one once the current one expires? And thank you.
I don’t have a Cloudflare certificate. What happened is that I have installed the existing SSL a while ago and after that started using cloudflare without setting an SSL with them.
The Live SSL Status show the certificate that’s used by Cloudflare. This is NOT the certificate issued by us, and it NOT the certificate installed on your hosting account. Cloudflare automatically manages the SSL certificate on your website that’s served through their network, and handles all setup, installation and renewal of the certificate. Out of the box, you don’t get any control over the certificates used.
The Live SSL will update when the current certificate is close to expiration and it will be a new certificate obtained by Cloudflare.
If you use Cloudflare, then your website will be using a certificate managed by Cloudflare. That’s how Cloudflare works.
You don’t set the SSL certificate with Cloudflare and Cloudflare doesn’t give the certificate to you. But they fully manage it on their end with no possible interaction from you (at least not without purchasing advanced certificate management, enterprise plans and whatnot).
So you have a Cloudflare certificate. And you have had one from the day you started to use Cloudflare.
I am not very familiar with how these things work. Now that I double check, the live SSL status in InfinityFree is saying "This is the SSL certificate that’s active on your site. If the domain is hosted elsewhere, it will show the certificate that’s active at that provider. ". When I check the SSL section in Cloudflare (I didn’t know that they set the SSL for me), the edge SSL certificate is showing the same expiry date as the live SSL in InfinityFree. Based on what you are saying (and I hope I got it right), Cloudflare manages this SSL for me and therefore when it will expire they will renew it automatically which means that the live SSL section in InfinityFree will reflect that. That being said, I don’t need to request a new SSL certificate from within InfinityFree account as the management of SSL certificates is done by Cloudflare now and as a result I shouldn’t worry about this from now on as it will renew automatically. Correct me if I am wrong and thank you.
Not quite. You are still responsable for renewing the certificate that keeps the connection between IF and Cloudflare secure. Cloudflare issues the certificate that keep the connection between Cloudflare and your users.
If you set Cloudflare ssl mode to “flexible”, it is less secure but then you don’t have to worry about renewing a certificate yourself. “Full” and “full (strict)” modes require you to have a certificate installed on IF (you are in charge of keeping this active)
