10 Years of Let’s Encrypt Certificates – Let’s Encrypt
December 11, 2025
On September 14, 2015, our first publicly-trusted certificate went live. We were proud that we had issued a certificate that a significant majority of clients could accept, and had done it using automated software. Of course, in retrospect this was just the first of billions of certificates. Today, Let’s Encrypt is the largest certificate authority in the world in terms of certificates issued, the ACME protocol we helped create and standardize is integrated throughout the server ecosystem, and we’ve become a household name among system administrators. We’re closing in on protecting one billion web sites.
Source: 10 Years of Let’s Encrypt Certificates – Let’s Encrypt
A decade ago, very few websites in the scheme of things used HTTPS. At that stage, I’d had websites for more than 20 years and never had a secure website in that way. Why was this the case? Well, it was typically expensive and, above all, technically really painful to provision certificates for a website. So unless you were very large or conducting commerce directly and required a secure connection, you almost certainly didn’t implement it.
In the last decade, that’s completely changed, you can now provision a certificate for a site at no cost, probably without even thinking about it. So ubiquitous are secure connections that when occasionally you visit one in a modern browser, it will provide copious warnings about the insecurity of that site. And all this is thanks to Let’s Encrypt, a project that made it much easier and most importantly free to create HTTPS for any web page. So happy anniversary, and if anything, I thought it had been longer.
