Certbot has a brand new website! Today we’ve launched a major update that will help Certbot’s users get started even more quickly and easily.
Certbot is a free, open source software tool for enabling HTTPS on manually-administered websites, by automatically deploying Let’s Encrypt certificates. Since we introduced it in 2016, Certbot has helped over a million users enable encryption on their sites, and we think this update will better meet the needs of the next million, and beyond.
Certbot is part of EFF’s larger effort to encrypt the entire Internet. Websites need to use HTTPS to secure the web. Along with our browser add-on, HTTPS Everywhere, Certbot aims to build a network that is more structurally private, safe, and protected against censorship.
This change is the culmination of a year’s work in understanding how users interact with the Certbot tool and information around it. Last year, the Certbot team ran user studies to identify areas of confusion—from questions users had when getting started to common mistakes that were often made. These findings led to changes in both the instructions for interacting with the command-line tool, and in how users get the full range of information necessary to set up HTTPS.
The new site will make it clearer what the best steps are for all users, whether that’s understanding the prerequisites to running Certbot, getting clear steps to install and run it, or figuring out how to get HTTPS in their setup without using Certbot at all.
Over a year ago, Let’s Encrypt hit 50 million active users—and counting. We hope this update will help us expand on that peak, and make unencrypted websites a thing of the past.
