Load index.html every time from the server and NOT from cache

I have a webpage index.html hosted on a particular server. I have pointed example.com to example.com/index.html. So when I make changes in index.html and save it, and then try to open example.com, the changes are not reflected. Reason that the webpages are being cached.

Then I manually refresh the page and since it loads the fresh copies and not from cache, it works fine. But I cannot ask my client to do so, and they want everything to be perfect. So my question is that is there a trick or technique as to how I can make the file load every time from the server and not from cache?

P.S: I know the trick for CSS, JS and images files, i.e. appending ?v=1 but don't know how to do it for index.html.

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks!

by this:

<meta http-equiv="expires" content="0">

Setting the content to "0" tells the browsers to always load the page from the web server.

The meta tags didn't worked for me so. i set the headers from the java class that implements filter or controller. and it worked. here is the code

HttpServletResponse httpResponse = (HttpServletResponse) response;
httpResponse.setHeader("Cache-Control", "no-cache, no-store, must-revalidate"); // HTTP 1.1
httpResponse.setHeader("Pragma", "no-cache"); // HTTP 1.0
httpResponse.setDateHeader("Expires", 0); // Proxies.

There are only two most reliable way available as of 2018

1. **<meta http-equiv="expires" content="0">** Use this meta tag but be careful because this tag destroy the all cache of the page as soon as a web page processed by browser.

2. Generate an unique ID at server for each page request and append this id at the end of the all file name inside the HTML document with ? before the unique id append on images, documents, css/js files, videos etc which need to be load from the server every time. For example if you have the HTML tag like <img src="images/profile223.jpg" alt="profile picture"> then on server side append the unique id at the end of the file name like this echo '<img src="images/profile223.jpg?'.$uniqueid.'"" alt="profile picture">'; . In this example i use php but you can generate the unique ID on any language. All big companies like Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter etc. uses this technique because it is most effective way and does not effect the cache data you want to store on user browser like login session id. This technique is cross browser compatible and support older version of IE, Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera. You may append the unique id at the end of the url using the same technique

You can try this below method. It worked for me.

Please add the below lines of code in your .htaccess file.

<IfModule mod_headers.c>

    <FilesMatch "\.(html|php)$">
        Header set Cache-Control "no-cache, no-store, must-revalidate"
        Header set Pragma "no-cache"
    	Header set Expires 0
    </FilesMatch>
    
    <FilesMatch "\.(ico|pdf|jpg|png|gif|js|css)$">
        Header set Cache-Control "max-age=172800, public, must-revalidate"
    </FilesMatch>

</IfModule>

If you use the above code, browser will not cache .html files.

Adding this meta tags to the header works for most of the browsers (in that case index.html will not be cached):

<meta http-equiv="cache-control" content="max-age=0" />
<meta http-equiv="cache-control" content="no-cache" />
<meta http-equiv="expires" content="0" />
<meta http-equiv="expires" content="Tue, 01 Jan 1980 1:00:00 GMT" />
<meta http-equiv="pragma" content="no-cache" />

A bit late but it might help someone else!

You can send extra headers with the file to tell the client (the browser, that is) that the file must not be cached. If you got Apache, take a look at mod_expires. If you use a server side scripting language, like PHP, you can solve it using that too.

i ever meet this problem with my website. in your URL add the q=''

http://yoururl.com/somelinks?q=fill_with_random_number

for me, it works

I highly recommend not using meta tags and use htaccess as Murali Krishna Bellamkonda posted. That will always be the best and most secure dependable way. You can fine tune your whole system to stay cached for long times, refresh files at specific times, etc... Go ahead and try all them meta tags at once, and see what happens! (no I wouldnt) Look into Header set Cache-Control "max-age=5, immutable" with ExpiresDefault A5 for a no cache option.