Validity periods and renewal
For Universal certificates, Cloudflare controls the validity periods and certificate authorities (CAs), making sure that renewal always occur.
Universal certificates issued by Let's Encrypt, Google Trust Services, or SSL.com have a 90-day validity period. Cloudflare no longer uses DigiCert for newly issued Universal certificates and, for existing ones, the validity period is being adjusted from one year to 90 days.
For 90-day certificates, the auto renewal period starts 30 days before expiration.
When you order an advanced certificate, you can select the following values for the Certificate validity period:
| Certificate validity period | Auto renewal period | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| 1 year | 30 days | Soon to be deprecated |
| 3 months | 30 days | |
| 1 month | 7 days | Not supported by Let's Encrypt |
| 2 weeks | 3 days | Not supported by Let's Encrypt |
Cloudflare only issues certificates with validity periods of three months or less for two reasons.
First, shorter-lived certificates limit the damage from key compromise and mistaken issuance. Any compromised key material will be valid for a shorter period of time.
Second, shorter certificates encourage automation. The more frequently you have to do a task, the more likely you will want to automate it. Automation also means that you are less likely to let a certificate expire in production or give a person access to key material.
For more details on the benefits of shorter validity periods, refer to our blog post introducing Advanced Certificate Manager ↗.
For certificates managed by Cloudflare, attempts to renew start at the auto renewal period (based on the different validity periods) and continue up until 24 hours before expiration.
If a certificate fails to renew and another valid certificate exists for the hostname, Cloudflare will deploy the valid certificate within these last 24 hours.
For information regarding custom certificates (managed by you), consider this other page on renewal and expiration.