Domain and certificate expiry
The two dates that take a website offline without warning, in one place.
Two dates, one outage each
A domain and a certificate both expire on a date nobody has written down. They were set by whoever registered them, often years ago, usually with renewal notices going to an inbox that person no longer reads.
Losing either takes the site down completely. A lapsed certificate replaces every page with a full-screen security warning; a lapsed domain removes the site from the internet, takes your email with it, and after a grace period lets somebody else buy the name.
What to do with the answer
Put both dates in a calendar today, with a reminder a month before each. That is the entire fix, it takes two minutes, and it is more reliable than any monitoring service because it does not depend on an email arriving.
While you are in the registrar account, check that the contact email is one somebody actually reads, and that auto-renew is on. Most lost domains are not lost through neglect of the calendar — they are lost because the renewal notice went to a former employee.
The transfer lock
A registrar lock stops your domain being transferred away without being unlocked first. It is free, it takes a minute, and it is the difference between a stolen registrar password costing you an afternoon and costing you your domain name.
This check reports whether the lock is set. If it is not, turn it on — there is no downside except the same minute’s work when you genuinely do want to move registrar.
Why some dates are missing
Registries publish less than they used to. Several redact the expiry date entirely, and some country domains never published one. A blank here means the registry does not say, not that the domain has no expiry — your registrar always knows, and its control panel is the authority.
Certificates are different: the date is inside the certificate your server presents, so it is always readable. A certificate issued for about ninety days is a Let’s Encrypt-style one that renews itself, and the thing worth checking is that the renewal job still runs — not the date.