Auto Refresh Page Every N Seconds in JavaScript

Hey there! Today we’re going to explore how to refresh a web page after a specific amount of time has passed using JavaScript.

To refresh a page every N seconds, we need to use the setTimeout() and the location.reload() method available from the global window object.

The setTimeout() function is used to execute a specific function after a certain amount of time has passed. This function accepts 2 parameters:

  1. The function to run once the time has passed
  2. The time delay before the function is executed (in milliseconds)

The following example shows how to refresh the page every 5 seconds. I will explain the code below:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
  <body>
    <h2>Refresh Every 5 Seconds</h2>

    <script>
      setTimeout(() => {
        window.location.reload();
      }, 5000);
    </script>
  </body>
</html>

Inside the <script> tag of the code above, you can see that the setTimeout() function is called with two parameters.

First, we passed the function that will be executed after a delay. Since we want to refresh the page, we need to pass a call to the window.location.reload() method.

Second, we passed the amount of time to delay calling the reload() method in milliseconds. We want the delay to be 5 seconds, so we need to pass 5000 milliseconds.

The setTimeout() method will run again after the page has been refreshed. This way, we will refresh the page every 5 seconds infinitely.

You can adjust the second parameter to delay a specific amount of time you want.

Conclusion

Now you’ve learned how to refresh a page every N seconds using JavaScript.

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See you in other articles! 👋

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