Why Download the SSL Certificate of a Website?

The content of a SSL certificate is publicly available to web browsers so that they can determine the trust-level of a website to enable https access.

Besides this reason there can be many other legitimate reasons to download the publicly-available SSL certificate of a website.

For example, you may need to decode details of a certificate to remind yourself of it's expiry date and other info it contains.

Recently a customer needed to be shown that a revoked certificate installed by their web developer was not the one bought via our website.

The only way to do this was by letting them see the content of both the installed cert on their website and the cert available from their Order Details page.

Choosing The Method

While there are technical methods to download the SSL certificate installed for a website, we prefer to give you a very simple 2-step method using Qualys SSL Labs' free online Server Test tool.

Step-1: Visit the Server Test Page

Qualys SSL Labs Server Test start page

Visit this direct link and enter your Hostname (domain name or sub-domain name) in the text input field. Then hit the Submit button. Wait a few minutes for the server test to complete.

Step-2: View or Download the Certificate

qualys ssl labs server test download certificate

Option to download server ssl certificate

Scroll down to a section called Certificate #1 and click the download icon as shown above. This will take you to another page with the content of the SSL certificate installed on the website.