GoDaddy SSL Renewal temporarily changed DNS

As a Website Designer, I like to share problems and solutions that I run into as I work on client websites. I wanted to share this GoDaddy SSL / DNS issue, as I couldn't find any support forums with any info on this specific problem we ran into:

I have a client with a Wordpress WooCommerce site hosted with WPEngine, but the domain and DNS is setup at GoDaddy – originally GoDaddy hosted the Wordpress site, but we were having a lot of issues with slow page loading times and corrupt databases, so we moved to WPEngine for faster loading and less problems in 2019.

This morning, my client tried to login to the site and it was going to our old GoDaddy hosted version of the site from 2019. Naturally, she panicked and called me. They had also received an email this morning from GoDaddy saying that their SSL certificate was issued (renewed), see it on the right.

So, I chatted with GoDaddy and WPEngine support, and, of course, while I was chatting, the website seemed to have reverted back to the correct WPEngine hosted website! Since it resolved itself after a couple of hours with no changes from us, I assumed that this was caused by the SSL certificate automatically renewing and getting issued this morning. At least, that’s all I could think that may have caused the temporary change to point to our old GoDaddy hosted Wordpress site while the SSL certificate was updating… So I just asked GoDaddy chat support and they confirmed that yes, the SSL certificate change may have caused this. Go figure!  It just happened to be that the client tried to login during the SSL renewal process this morning, when the site was temporarily going to the GoDaddy servers. Murphy’s Law, right?! That was an hour of chatting and frustration wasted. But that's why I'm posting this here for any others who run into this – if you get a SSL Certificate is Ready email from GoDaddy, and your site is hosted elsewhere, there may be a few hours of downtime while the SSL populates.

Also, we realized that we also didn't even need the GoDaddy SSL cert anymore for the site, as WPEngine Hosting provides the SSL as part of their hosting plan that we were using. This SSL on GoDaddy is no longer being used, but when it was propagating it must have defaulted the DNS settings back to GoDaddy temporarily somehow. Who knows, the mystery of the internet! But we will cancel that SSL cert going forward on GoDaddy since we're no longer using it! This client's GoDaddy account has several other domains associated with it, so we left the domain registered there.