Most people never think about their website's security certificate until the morning it breaks. The site stops loading, visitors get a scary red warning instead of your homepage, and someone forwards you a screenshot asking if you have been hacked. You have not been hacked. A certificate expired, and nobody got the memo.
If your team uses Claude, there is now a much smaller-effort way to stay ahead of this. TLS Radar has a free plugin for Claude Code that lets you handle three certificate jobs by asking in plain English - no dashboards to learn, no technical setup, no being a security expert.
First, what is an SSL certificate, in one paragraph
An SSL/TLS certificate is the thing that puts the little padlock next to your web address and turns "http" into "https". It encrypts the connection between your site and your visitors, and it tells their browser your site is the real thing. Certificates have an expiry date. When one lapses, browsers stop trusting the site and show a full-page warning - which is exactly the moment you lose sign-ups and sales. If you want the longer version, we wrote a plain-English guide to certificate monitoring.
Three things you can now just ask for
1. "Is this website's certificate OK?" Ask Claude to scan any domain and it comes back with a clear answer: who issued the certificate, when it expires, and whether anything is already wrong with it. No account needed, and it works on any site - yours, a vendor's, a competitor's.
2. "Get me a certificate for my domain." Need a fresh certificate? The plugin can issue a free one through Beacon, TLS Radar's certificate service, in about ten minutes. It walks you through the steps and hands back a ready-to-install file. No cost, no account.
3. "Tell me before my certificate expires." This is the one that prevents the bad morning. Ask Claude to keep an eye on your domain, and TLS Radar watches it continuously and warns you well before the expiry date - while there is still plenty of time to act. The free plan covers one domain.
Why this is different from setting a calendar reminder
A calendar reminder only works if the right person is still at the company, still reads that inbox, and actually acts on it. It also only catches the expiry date. Real monitoring catches the quieter problems too - a certificate that was installed wrong, or one a browser has quietly stopped trusting - the kind of thing that takes a site down even though the date still looks fine.
And because you are asking in plain language rather than logging into yet another tool, it is the kind of check that actually gets done instead of sitting on a someday list.
What you need
You need Claude Code, the version of Claude that developers run alongside their work. If that is your team, a developer installs the free plugin once, signs in through a normal browser approval screen (no API keys, no copied passwords), and from then on anyone can ask. The scanning and free-certificate parts do not even require an account.
It is free and open source. Here is the plugin page with everything it can do. If you would rather not go through Claude at all, you can always scan a domain right here on the site or set up monitoring with a free account - same protection, different door.
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Keep reading
SSL/TLS in Your Terminal: The TLS Radar Claude Code Plugin
What Is SSL/TLS Certificate Monitoring and Why Does It Matter?
Venafi Alternatives: When the Enterprise Tool Is Overkill
Related guides
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What Is SSL/TLS Certificate Monitoring? A Complete Guide
A plain-English definition of SSL/TLS certificate monitoring, what it catches beyond expiry, and why shorter certificate lifespans are making it essential.
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“This Website Cannot Be Trusted”: What It Means and How to Fix It
What the “this website cannot be trusted” error really means, and how to fix it fast.