How to Properly Remove IIS Binding with Attached SSL Certifcate

Earlier this month we were working with a client that wanted us to open up their SharePoint Server 2013 site to the internet via Secure Socket Layer (SSL). Now there are many steps involved in this process including ordering an SSL Certificate from a trusted certificate authority (we chose GoDaddy for this client). However, the focus of this blog is a resolution for one issue where we successfully removed the “https” binding from the attached SSL certificate. If you add a binding in the IIS8 interface, and then try to remove that binding the same way, you might run into an error message that says,

“The certificate associated with this binding is also assigned to another site’s binding. Deleting this binding will cause the HTTPS binding of another site to be unstable. Do you still want to continue?”

CANCEL THIS! Do not remove the binding by pressing continue. Instead, perform the following steps to avoid any further problems:

1. Launch Windows Explorer
2. Navigate to this location %windir%system32inetsrv
3. Open the application.config file using a text editor like Notepad
4. It is always a good idea to save a copy of this file before making any changes
5. Scroll down until you find the name of the IIS website
6. You will see the bindings listed under the website name. Simply highlight and delete the binding that you no longer need and then re-save the text file to the location in step 2
7. Re-open IIS8 to verify that the binding has been removed from the website

BOOM! DONE!