Certificate Signing Request (CSR) is a request send to a Certificate Authority (CA) for the purpose of generating a digital certificate. CAs generally ask for CSR either during or after the order process. Every CSR contains the following information together with a public key:

Common Name (CN)

Common Name is the Full Qualified Domain Name (FQDN) of the website where the certificate will be used. For example, you’ll input “www.business.com”, omitting http:// or https:// prefix. In the case of Wildcard Certificates, you would add an asterisk before the base domain i.e “*.business.com”.

Subject Alternative Names

Subject Alternative Names are to be included for Unified Communications Certificates and EV Multi-Domain Certificates. Input this field for other domains in addition to the Common Name (CN), for use within one certificate.

Organisation

Organisation is the company’s registered name under business listings

Department

Department is the department that will be handling all certificate issues. For example, IT Department.

City, State, Country

Where in which country, city and state is the business entity located at.

With these information, CAs can then be instructed to proceed with getting order approval and certificate issuance.

CSR can be created in 2 ways (Choose 1):

1. Web Server Software

CSR generation is different for all web server softwares. You would need to check what server software you are using and generate CSR based on the instructions provided by your web server provider.

2. DigiCert Certificate Utility for Windows 

If you are unsure how to create a CSR based on your web server software, DigiCert Certificate Utility for Windows can help generate the CSR for you. All you’ll need to do is fill up the respective fields and leave ‘Key Size’ and ‘Provider’ as it is.

Learn more about the DigiCert Utility