Do You Need SSL on a Domain With a 301 Redirect?

You’re here because you want to know one thing: do you need an SSL certificate for a domain with a 301 redirect?

Maybe you bought an aged domain from a marketplace, and you want to know if you need an SSL certificate for it. Or maybe you have an old domain you redirected to another domain, and you’re wondering if you need to renew its SSL.

Listen, whatever brought you here, we’ve got you covered. Because the answer is always one and the same. Yes, you need an SSL certificate for a domain with a 301 redirect to another domain. Without one, users will see a security warning in their browsers, and the redirect won’t go through.

A 301 redirect is an HTTP response status code to redirect users and search engine bots from one URL to another. The user clicks on a link or types in the URL, then the browser makes a request to the server. But instead of serving an HTML document, the server responds with a 301 status code to inform the browser about the permanent redirect.

Here’s how this works:

When the user visits the original URL on Domain A, their browser will make an HTTP request containing this:

GET / HTTP/1.1
Host: domain-a.com

The server, in turn, will respond with a “301 Moved Permanently” response code like this:

HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Location: http://domain-b.com/

But if the domain name under the original URL doesn’t have an SSL certificate, the browser will treat the connection is insecure and unsafe. Most modern browsers will prevent the user from opening the URL’s contents and show a warning message discouraging from doing so instead.

To prevent this from happening, make sure to always have an SSL certificate on the domain with the 301 redirect.

Thanks for reading this far, and I hope this helped. If you have any questions, leave a reply below.