Guides 7 min read Published January 29, 2025

How to Setup Free Auto-Renewing SSL Certificates on AWS CloudFront & Route 53 with ACM

Step-by-step guide to provisioning free, automatically-renewed SSL/TLS certificates using AWS Certificate Manager and CloudFront.

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CheckSSLExpiry Security Research Team SSL/TLS Security & Cryptographic Reliability

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Important Prerequisite: us-east-1 Region for CloudFront

AWS CloudFront requires all custom SSL certificates to be created in the us-east-1 (N. Virginia) region, regardless of where your S3 buckets or EC2 instances are physically hosted.

Step-by-Step AWS ACM Setup

  1. Open AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) in the us-east-1 region.
  2. Click Request a public certificate.
  3. Add your domain names: example.com and *.example.com.
  4. Select DNS validation (recommended for automatic auto-renewals).
  5. Click Create records in Route 53 to automatically insert the CNAME challenge verification records.
  6. Attach the issued certificate to your CloudFront distribution under Custom SSL certificate.

⚡ Check If Your CloudFront Certificate Is Active

Verify that your custom domain is serving the AWS ACM certificate properly.

Check AWS SSL Status →
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