How SiteGlowUp manages your SSL certificate

The short answer

You don't have to do anything. Your site's SSL (HTTPS) certificate is automatic, free, and renews itself forever — as long as your site is live on SiteGlowUp.

What happens behind the scenes

1. When you first go live — we ask Amazon Certificate Manager (ACM) for a free TLS certificate for your domain. ACM validates that you own the domain via the DNS records we set up automatically. Issuance typically completes in 5–15 minutes.

1. Once issued — we attach the cert to your site's CloudFront distribution. Your URL flips from http://... to https://... automatically; old http requests are redirected to https.

1. Every 30 minutes — a background process (we call it cert-health) checks every customer site, confirms the cert is still valid, and re-attaches if it ever drifts. This catches edge cases like a customer's domain DNS being mid-flight when the cert was first issued.

1. A few weeks before expiration — ACM auto-renews. We don't intervene because AWS handles the rotation transparently. The new cert is hot-swapped onto the distribution; visitors never notice.

1. If your domain ever stops resolving — ACM detects this and pauses renewals. We get an alarm; we investigate. (This has only happened once in the company's history, when a customer let their domain expire.)

If a scanner gave you an "SSL grade"

Tools like SSL Labs grade SSL configurations from A+ down to F. The grade depends on:

• TLS version — we use TLS 1.2 + 1.3 (TLS 1.0/1.1 disabled, anything ≥A grade)
• Cipher suites — managed by AWS CloudFront; refreshed continuously to drop weak ciphers as they get deprecated
• Certificate strength — RSA 2048-bit + ECDSA P-256
• HSTS preload — your site emits Strict-Transport-Security: max-age=31536000; includeSubdomains; preload (the strongest setting)

A typical scan result for a SiteGlowUp site: A+ on SSL Labs.

If you got a lower grade than A, it's worth investigating — email support@siteglowup.ai with the scan URL and we'll look into it. You don't need to take any action yourself — there's nothing to configure on your side.

What you can do

Click Managed on the Health-page recommendation. The "Managed by SiteGlowUp" badge is a reminder that this is on our side of the line, not yours. We monitor and fix any cert issues proactively.