Knowledge Base

How to renew an expired SSL certificate in Plesk?

Question

When Plesk or a Plesk website is opened via HTTPS, a warning regarding an expired certificate is displayed. How can I renew this certificate?

Answer

Plesk offers different ways of renewing and using SSL certificates.

For free SSL certificates:

Plesk has the SSL It! extension, which allows using and renewing free Let's Encrypt SSL certificates for domains and their aliases. The extension is capable of self-renewing such certificates, so there is no need to worry about manual renewals.

More details on how to install and use free Let's Encrypt certificate for a domain can be found in this article.

For the Plesk hostname itself, the article is here.

Note: There is an exception here. If a wildcard certificate is used for a domain and DNS is not managed by Plesk, it will be required to update the certificate manually as per the article due to the limitations on the Let's Encrypt side.

Note: If a free self-signed SSL certificate is used, generate a new one and upload it as described in this guide.

For paid SSL certificates:

In case a certificate is purchased from some certificate authority, for example, from Comodo and this certificate has expired, get in contact with the certificate issuer to obtain the renewed version of the certificate, because the SSL It! extension for Plesk cannot automatically renew paid SSL/TLS certificates.

After obtaining the new SSL from the third party, upload this new certificate for a a plesk domain as described here.

For the Plesk hostname itself, you may follow the steps from this article.