Prevent caching of HTML page

Question

I have a HTML page. The problem is that I do not want to have the users to refresh the page each time I put on new content.

I have the following code in order to make sure that the page is not cached:

     <meta http-equiv="Cache-Control" content="no-cache, no-store, must-revalidate"/>
     <meta http-equiv="Pragma" content="no-cache"/>
     <meta http-equiv="Expires" content="0"/>

The problem is, I still need to do a refresh on the page in order to get the most current content to show up. Am I doing something wrong? Should I be using some other tags?

@RyandeVries — Since the question says it *doesn't* work… — Quentin, May 23 '13 at 14:36
I ment by it that in my opinion this will never work, but I ain't sure though! — Ryan de Vries, May 23 '13 at 14:36
Do you mean you want content to auto-update while the user is watching a page, like a live stream? Or the next time a user visits your page, they seem to be displaying cached content? — jbehren, May 23 '13 at 14:48

score 30 · Answer 1 · edited May 23 '17 at 11:54

30

The Codesnippet you showed makes the browser load the website everytime it accesses it, which is useful if you perform frequent updates, but still have a static page.

<meta http-equiv="Cache-Control" content="no-cache, no-store, must-revalidate"/>
<meta http-equiv="Pragma" content="no-cache"/>
<meta http-equiv="Expires" content="0"/>

In case you want it to perform live updates, like it does for example in a (g)mail account, you need to make it refresh (parts of the page) itself. Use Javascript in this case, like it is shown in this question or an ajax call.

$('#something').click(function() {
    location.reload();
});

edited May 23 '17 at 11:54

Community

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answered May 23 '13 at 14:45

Garrin

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Garrin, I have an HTML page and yes, I make frequent updates. As such shouldn't work? It seems like I still need to do a refresh – Nate Pet May 23 '13 at 15:09
I still not surely know what you need/want to do. If you really need **live updates** while the user is still watching your page, you have to go for the Javascript/Ajax solution. But if you want the user to have the latest version of the website **everytime he visits it**, like if you update your website daily, your solution is good enough. – Garrin May 23 '13 at 15:14
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The reason is we are making updates to the html page which is a static page. We make these every 2 days. I like the user to see the latest version of it instead of clicking on refresh. – Nate Pet May 23 '13 at 15:16
I read a bit about it and according to [this question](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/49547/making-sure-a-web-page-is-not-cached-across-all-browsers) your snippet seems to be complete. I'm sorry if I couldn't help in this case. – Garrin May 23 '13 at 15:35
Does this work for HTML5 web pages? – ayjay Aug 04 '14 at 04:13
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Does this work for the HTML files itself only, or also all referenced sources? Also, does this work for HTML5 too? – Benny Bottema Feb 26 '15 at 12:45
@Plantface Yes, HTML file only. All referenced sources would each need to return similar HTTP response headers. Each referenced source is a separate HTTP request. Any version of HTML. But this is really an HTTP protocol thing, rather than HTML. – MrWhite Feb 21 '16 at 22:43

score 13 · Accepted Answer · answered May 23 '13 at 14:33

13

The values you have there are OK, but meta http-equiv is highly unreliable. You should be using real HTTP headers (the specifics of how you do this will depend on your server, e.g. for Apache).

answered May 23 '13 at 14:33

Quentin

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Prevent caching of HTML page

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