By Josh Aas, ISRG Executive Director · June 28, 2017

Let’s Encrypt has reached a milestone: we’ve now issued more than 100,000,000 certificates. This number reflects at least a few things:

First, it illustrates the strong demand for our services. We’d like to thank all of the sysadmins, web developers, and everyone else managing servers for prioritizing protecting your visitors with HTTPS.

Second, it illustrates our ability to scale. I’m incredibly proud of the work our engineering teams have done to make this volume of issuance possible. I’m also very grateful to our operational partners, including IdenTrust, Akamai, and Sumo Logic.

Third, it illustrates the power of automated certificate management. If getting and managing certificates from Let’s Encrypt always required manual steps there is simply no way we’d be able to serve as many sites as we do. We’d like to thank our community for creating a wide range of clients for automating certificate issuance and management.

The total number of certificates we’ve issued is an interesting number, but it doesn’t reflect much about tangible progress towards our primary goal: a 100% HTTPS Web. To understand that progress we need to look at this graph:

When Let’s Encrypt’s service first became available, less than 40% of page loads on the Web used HTTPS. It took the Web 20 years to get to that point. In the 19 months since we launched, encrypted page loads have gone up by 18%, to nearly 58%. That’s an incredible rate of change for the Web. Contributing to this trend is what we’re most proud of.

If you’re as excited about the potential for a 100% HTTPS Web as we are, please consider getting involved, making a donation, or sponsoring Let’s Encrypt.

Here’s to the next 100,000,000 certificates, and a more secure and privacy-respecting Web for everyone!