HTML Meta Refresh

Note: This post is over two years old and so the information contained here might be out of date. If you do spot something please leave a comment and we will endeavour to correct.

22nd May 2008 - 3 minutes read time

To get a webpage to refresh every few seconds you can use a meta tag with the attribute http-equiv and a value of refresh. The number of seconds to delay can be put into the content attribute. This meta tag (as will all meta tags) goes into the head section of the document.

Here is an example that refreshes the page every 2 seconds.

<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="2" />

It is also possible to make the browser refresh to another page by including the string:

url=url or filename

Within the content attribute. Here is an example that redirects the page to google.com after a 5 second delay.

<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="5;url=http://www.google.com" />

html

Add new comment

Related Content

Drupal 11: Finding A Better Way To Display Code Examples

18th January 2026

I've been running this site for about 18 years now and the code I post has been in much the same format since it was started. The code is rendered onto the page using a <code> element and (mostly) syntax highlighted using a JavaScript plugin.

The iframe srcdoc Attribute

6th December 2020

I was working on a web page generation program recently and was looking for a way to present different versions of the same page with slight differences in the markup and styles. Although using the iframe element came to mind I wasn't keen on rendering out lots of different versions of the page and then referencing them individually in each iframe.

Getting Started With PhoneGap And Android

4th January 2013

PhoneGap is a free and opensource framework for developing mobile applications. It is a great way of creating applications that work across multiple devices including iOS, Android, Blackberry, Windows and others. It works by rendering HTML pages using a browser, which means that you can create applications using just HTML and JavaScript.

Using The view-source Protocol

28th August 2008

If you are running FireFox (or Chrome) then there is a handy little short cut you can use to view the source of a page you are looking at. If you add the text view-source on any web address then you will see the equivalent of viewing the source of a page (perhaps by pressing Ctrl+u).

HTML And XHTML Doctypes

23rd June 2008

In order to validate any page of HTML or XHTML you will need a doctype. This is a string of text that sits at the top of the document and tells the browser exactly what markup standard has been used to create the page.

XHTML Strict

This doctype is used in an XHTML document when you are not using any framset or depreciated tags.

Convert HTML To ASCII With PHP

26th April 2008

The reverse of turning ASCII text into HTML is to convert HTML into ASCII. And to this end here is a little function that does this.