diff --git a/README.md b/README.md
index daedaae..e94132f 100644
--- a/README.md
+++ b/README.md
@@ -73,6 +73,8 @@ You can also run:
 
 This allows you to select a suite of URLs (in this case, "basic"), and open them in Chromium. This is useful for manually testing a set of URLs.
 
+If, when running locally, you are seeing errors about certificates not being valid, set NODE_ENV to be 'development' e.g. `NODE_ENV=development;n-test smoke -H http://localhost:8080`. This will use some launch options that ignore certificate errors.
+
 ### Expectations
 
 Checking response statii is great for checking that your application responds with _something_, but not necessarily the right thing. n-test comes with a bunch of basic things that you check for.
diff --git a/lib/smoke/smoke-test.js b/lib/smoke/smoke-test.js
index eea2b47..71d361d 100644
--- a/lib/smoke/smoke-test.js
+++ b/lib/smoke/smoke-test.js
@@ -66,7 +66,8 @@ class SmokeTest {
 		const crossBrowserTests = [];
 
 		// https://github.com/GoogleChrome/puppeteer/issues/2377
-		this.browser = await puppeteer.launch({args: ['--ignore-certificate-errors', '--enable-features=NetworkService']});
+		const launchOptions = (process.NODE_ENV === 'development') ? {args: ['--ignore-certificate-errors', '--enable-features=NetworkService']} : {};
+		this.browser = await puppeteer.launch(launchOptions);
 
 		for (let suiteOptions of configsToRun) {
 			for (let path in suiteOptions.urls) { //eslint-disable-line guard-for-in