Let’s Encrypt announces wildcard certificates

As of January 2018, Let’s Encrypt provides wildcard certificates. According to the organization, the offer will help in the effort to move the entire www to https. Wildcard certificates instantly secure connections from all subdomains.

The Let’s Encrypt organization claims to have had many requests to supply wildcard certificates. These types of certificates allow administrators to use a single SSL certificate and a key pair for a domain and all subdomains, making the implementation of https easier. Let’s Encrypt will provide the wildcards for free via the upcoming api endpoint for the acme v2 protocol.

In June, the organization issued its 100 millionth SSL certificate since the project began in late 2015. These certificates now cover 47 million domains, making the project an important contribution to the growth of the number of encrypted connections. The percentage of web pages that are loaded via https is said to have increased from 40 to 58 percent since the end of 2015.