Just the other day that I was explaining to a colleague about what a Meta Refresh was, I use “was” because it seems SOOOO long ago that I’ve even had to think about these dinosaurs of the web.
Meta refresh is a command which is inserted into the header of a webpage along side the other meta tags This tag tells the browser to reload the page. Meta refresh can also be used to reload from one page to another.
This was an old method of sending visitors from one page to another, at the same time these were used heavily in SEO. The search engine would drive traffic to one page on a site and then and tricky SEO’r would then use a meta refresh to reload the browser and send the visitor to another page. This form of controlling traffic / visitors is now frowned upon within the SEO / Search space.
Meta refresh tag can also increase the impressions of you page, each time the page is loaded in the browser you can tell the browser to reload every couple of seconds. This too is a sneaky trick that some sites once used, it would help improve page impressions and banner impression figures (though at the same time kill CTR for these banners).
I’ve included an example of some meta refresh code below. The most important part of this tag being the content command, this command tells the browser when to refresh and what to refresh too.
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv=”refresh” content=”2;url=http://www.yoursite.com/newpage.htm” />
<title>Page Has Mved</title>
</head>
<body>
This Page Will Meta Refresh in 2 Seconds
</body>
</html>
If there is a page on your website you no longer want people to land on BUT don’t want to send them to a 404 page it’s best to use a 301 redirect.
How do you change this code so it only refreshes on load?
I design websites and often a customer will be looking at the cached version and doesn’t know they need to refresh – or they find it a pain in the butt.
I don’t want an annoying reload every 2 seconds – ONLY on load, so they are looking at the latest revision to their page automatically.
Hi JIm,
Place this at the top of your page:
Then change your to say;