Site unsecure / connection is not private message

Why am I seeing a message saying the connection is not private?

So you have visited one of our sites and got a “this site is not secure” message. First and foremost, our sites are secure and we will explain why you are seeing this message and how to resolve it. If you want to understand why you are seeing the error read on, otherwise just skip to the “How to fix” section. In fact, this is becoming quite a common issue for websites that are not one of the large global tech companies like Google, Facebook or Amazon. This is all to do with the SSL certificates (the little padlock symbol you see next to the web address in your browser). These are basically licences to prove the website you are visiting is the one owned by the company that owns the domain name. This is great as it stops website A pretending to be website B. However, the way this is handled is not very 21st century and involves manually keying security keys, copy and pasting and uploading files to each website for each renewal. You also need to time it to the minute the change as if old and new certificates overlap this can cause problems as well as having site errors. In addition to all this, the version of a certificate people see may not be a “live” version and so even with perfect timing, you may still see issues on different computers depending on how the individual browser is keeping local copies or “caching” information.

In the first days of the web, an SSL could last for 10 years. Hence a couple of days every decade of the site not working whilst the certificates were updated was not considered an issue. However, this has since changed to 2 years, then 1 and now there is a discussion of changing it to every 3 months and has really been driven by companies such as Apple and Google not allowing websites to be accessed unless the SSL issued is really recent (even if it has not expired yet and is still valid). This is meaning companies are having to cancel valid SSL certificates and go through the process more regularly, which is you have multiple websites means an increased chance of the customer seeing issues. For ourselves, we have oilanalysislab.com, lubewear.com and learnoilanalysislab.com to keep up to date with the certificates. We time our certificate updates to ideally be on weekends, during the night and a day or two before the certificate expires, but sometimes windows, google or apple update may render the certificate duration as not sufficiently recent enough meaning a spontaneous rekeying of the page is needed. We apologise when this takes place as it often means perhaps a day of issues for our customers if this occurs. Thankfully, that is our problem and not yours and if you want to carry on using the site whilst the SSL rekeying is being done you can do so with ease. Simply follow these simple instructions below.

How to fix it?

It’s quite simple to follow the steps below depending on your browser. If you are still having this message come up after 48 hours try clearing your cache and if it still appears after that please use the contact us button to let us know.