SSL Certificate Checker: How to Actually Verify Your TLS Setup (Not Just the Green Lock)

Most SSL certificate checker tools answer one question: is this cert valid right now? That's useful for about 30 seconds. The interesting failures, chains that work in Chrome but break in curl, OCSP staples that silently degrade, certs that pass every browser check but kill your B2B webhooks, never show up in the green-lock view. After enough 2am pages, I stopped trusting any tool that just gives me a thumbs up. This post walks through what an honest cert check actually covers, the CLI commands