SSL Certification is normally needed for e-commerce sites and hence we had gone for the same at the time of launching our e-com site www.indiacod.com. now this certification is valid for one year and one week before its scheduled expiry, we were getting daily reminders to renew it. Knowing fully well that we needed to do it either way n ideally on time, we still chose to ignore it while tending to “other important” tasks such as order fulfillment on other sites.
On 4th this month, when we tried opening our site www.indiacod.com, we saw that nasty message on ugly yellow background warning us that the SSL certificate of the site has expired, the site could be a spam and many other scary messages like “Get me out of here”. it almost felt like those cigarette ads before the movies.
But the damage was done. we went into overdrive to get the SSL restored but despite best efforts it took 6 days and got restored only today afternoon. you can see how sharp, precipitating and swift was the fall of visitors to the site and then how it got restored to some extent the moment SSL got restored.
The lessons for all of us here including self. Never delay things which are critical. the best time to complete any important task is NOW and not LATER.
I exchanged a few snarls with my partner over the issue. ( I love blaming others no matter who is at fault 😉 ) . Anyways a lesson learnt the hard way.