Question

I’m building a website whose hosting supports only html and javascript. I’ve corrected some mistakes but visitors probably won’t see them because browsers can’t show the updated pages. They show the old pages.

I remember “html expires” code but it’s too late. Because many visitors saw our site.

Answer 1

I’m assuming your HTML files aren’t being updated and not CSS style sheets or JS files (for which the answer would be different).

This is mainly a server side issue – you would have to check with your hosting provider what caching headers the server emits. Ideally, the server would listen to if-modified-since requests from browsers so it can serve updated content if there is any, and make the browser use the cached copy if there is none.

To remedy the problem at hand, you may need to rename your existing HTML files, or put them in a new directory. That will force the browser to actively re-fetch them. Of course, that still means that the entry point (usually index.html) will have to be re-fetched by the client – otherwise they will never notice the new structure, and hence not re-load anything.

A hosting configuration that indiscriminately dishes out caching instructions that prevent frequent updates from being made is not really useful. Talking to your hosting provider would probably be a good idea.