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I am wondering what the impact is on a website visitor when the website has had a TLD change.

Take for example, https://subdomain.example.com. Let's say this domain changes to https://subdomain.example.net. Visitors accessing the former, will be redirected to the latter.

When the TLS certificate for the former expires, what is the impact on visitors? Will they be immediately redirected, or will they see the untrusted page in their web browser?

My specific use case is that I am changing a TLD from .tv to .ai. The .tv TLS certificate expires in April 2018. Do I need to renew that certificate just to avoid the untrusted warning, or will a redirect skip the TLS check?

Patrick Mevzek
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Paul Fleming
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    Your question is exactly the same for any name change, it has nothing specifically to do with the TLD. You can also buy a single X.509 certificate with multiple names in it, so that you cover both old and new names – Patrick Mevzek Feb 15 '18 at 14:58

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TLD pointing to a new server will unfortunately break permalinks around, as well as robots permalinks and stat builders. So if you are talking HTTP redirection, TLS applies to the HTTP resource request, not to the server request. Therefore in that situation, you will have in order:

  1. connection to port 443 on your first server.
  2. consolidation of a TLS connection with that server.
  3. request of the HTTP '/...' resource on that server.
  4. redirection to another HTTP(S) resource.

I would expect your users to get the untrusted page displayed at step 3.

Patrick Mevzek
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TallFurryMan
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  • Thanks for the answer, seems I need to renew the cert afterall. And here's me hoping to save a few $$$. How confident are you in your answer? Or is there a way that you know of that I can test this? – Paul Fleming Feb 15 '18 at 13:47
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    @PaulFleming TallFurryMan is correct, HTTPS is built on TLS, so nothing happens at HTTPS level (level 7) before levels below are complete, and TLS is a level 3 thing (in the ISO/Internet stack of protocols). – Patrick Mevzek Feb 15 '18 at 15:01