Wildcard SSL Certificate

Starting on 2020-09-01 SSL/TLS certificates cannot be issued for longer than 13 months (397 days). Any SSL certificate bought after this date will have the new term length applied and those bought before will be grandfathered in. For more information check out this blog article that goes into more detail around the term change and GoDaddy’s response.

Wildcard SSL certificates are single certificates with a wildcard character (*) in the domain name field. This allows the certificate to authenticate and provide HTTPS encryption to a website and all of its subdomains under the same base domain, protecting the exchange of valuable information visitors send to or receive from a website’s primary domain or its subdomains.

For example, let’s say you own lilysbikes.com and you need to encrypt your site, but you also need to make sure blog.lilysbikes.com and shop.lilysbikes.com are secure. A wildcard SSL lets you protect all three, as well as any other subdomains you might have.

First off, there’s no limit to the number of subdomains you can protect. If you have a large business site with many subdomains, all of them are covered under one certificate as long as they are at the same level.  

Additionally, when you have a lot of subdomains, it is significantly cheaper to get a wildcard certificate to cover all of them, instead of multiple individual certificates.

Wildcard Certificates are available as Domain (DV) or Organization/Individual Validated (OV/IV) SSL certificates. Due to the industry requirements behind EV certificates, we are unable to issue a Wildcard EV SSL certificate.

If you are using an SSL certificate to cover multiple subdomains on a Microsoft Exchange server, you will need to purchase a UCC SSL certificate instead of a Wildcard SSL certificate, as Exchange requires that each subdomain is spelled out on the certificate for it to work correctly. This also ensures that older mobile devices will be able to properly connect to your Exchange certificate, as there are older mobile operating systems that are unable to recognize a Wildcard SSL certificate.

No. You cannot use a wildcard domain in a UCC certificate. In this case, you would need to evaluate your needs, as well as the number of subdomains you need to cover to determine which type of SSL certificate would work best for you.