Error 526 but my site is hosted with Cloudflare and the SSL certificate is fine

Website, Application, Performance Security
1

What is the name of the domain?

dorianmcintush.com

What is the error number?

526

What is the issue you’re encountering

My site is hosted with Cloudflare, and uses the default SSL certificate. It’s been working fine for over a year but when I tried to access the site today I got error 526. Checked the SSL certificate, it’s still active, not self signed, sslshopper.com shows it as fine. I don’t know how to fix this.

What is the current SSL/TLS setting?

Full (strict)

2

May I ask what SSL option have you got selected under the SSL/TLS tab at Cloudflare dashboard for your domain ( Flexible, Full, Full Strict … )? :thinking:

Before moving to Cloudflare, was your Website working over HTTPS connection?

Best way is to temporary Pause Cloudflare for your site. Wait few minutes. Double-check the origin SSL certificate. Renew it. After the Website works okay over HTTPS, un-pause and all good.

Steps for troubleshooting:

  1. Use the “Pause Cloudflare on Site” option from the Overview tab for your domain at dash.cloudflare.com .
  2. The link is in the lower right corner of that page.
  3. Give it five minutes to take effect, then make sure site is working as expected with HTTPS without any error
  4. Check with your hosting provider / Plesk panel / cPanel AutoSSL / Let’s Encrypt / ACME / Certbot and manually click to renew it
  5. Only then, when your website responds over HTTPS, you should un-pause Cloudflare and double-check your SSL/TLS setting to make sure it’s set to Full (Strict).
3

In the original question I gave the details that I use the Full (Strict) certificate and that I use Cloudflare for hosting.

It was working fine over HTTPS until recently and I’ve only ever used Cloudflare for the certificate. I switched to Cloudflare for hosting about 5 months ago and the switch went smoothly and the website still worked.

I’ll try pausing.

El El vie, ene 3, 2025 a la(s) 9:01 a.m., fritex via Cloudflare Community <[email protected]> escribió:

4

If the DNS records were proxied :orange: when you pointed to the new IP address of the web hosting server , it could be the hosting provider couldn’t issue the SSL certificate, therefrom using wrong SSL settings would cause such an error you’re experiencing. Following the above steps would help. Feel free to reply back with feedback and post further questions.

5

Site worked fine when Cloudflare was paused.

Cloudflare is my hosting provider. It says my SSL certificate is active. I’m not sure what else to check

6

Hello,

Cloudflare is my hosting provider

Cloudflare isn’t a web hosting service provider. You would need to have existing website with your own domain name and hosting before using Cloudflare.

Kindly review this post : Is cloudflare hosting my website?

Error 526 occurs when these two conditions are true:

  1. Cloudflare cannot validate the SSL certificate at your origin web server, and
  2. Full SSL (Strict) SSL is set in the Overview tab of your Cloudflare SSL/TLS app

For the resolution, kindly review this document : Error 526

Thank you !!

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7

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