When you are creating WordPress page or post redirects one of the most common need is to redirect a page after the user refreshes the page. In a recent WordPress plugin development task, I needed to create a multiple steps on-boarding user verification plugin that required a redirect on refresh for the last step of the on-boarding process.
Obviously there are several ways you can create a redirect after a page is refreshed but on WordPress I found it was too complicated to use the jQuery as follows:
$(window).bind('beforeunload',function(){
//save info somewhere
return 'are you sure you want to redirect since you have refreshed the page?';
});
In situation where I can use JavaScript, I prefer it to PHP since I find it easier to manipulate things using the DOM
Detect Page refresh jQuery
If you would like to use jQuery to detect page fresh the code snippets below can be very useful :
$('body').bind('beforeunload',function(){
//do something
});
or you can use the code snippet I shared earlier.
Detect Page Refresh PHP
In my specific case, I needed to detect the page refresh using PHP rather than JavaScript. You can achieve this using the following code snippet in PHP :
$pageWasRefreshed = isset($_SERVER['HTTP_CACHE_CONTROL']) && $_SERVER['HTTP_CACHE_CONTROL'] === 'max-age=0';
if($pageWasRefreshed ) {
//do something because page was refreshed;
} else {
//do nothing;
}
This code snippet detects if the page has been refreshed using the F5, Right-Click or Reload,and if it is refreshed you can conditionally add your logic to the IF statement
Joe is an experienced full-stack web developer with a decade of industry experience in the LAMP & MERN stacks, WordPress, WooCommerce, and JavaScript – (diverse portfolio). He has a passion for creating elegant and user-friendly solutions and thrives in collaborative environments. In his spare time, he enjoys exploring new tech trends, tinkering with new tools, and contributing to open-source projects. You can hire me here for your next project.
Using Cookies to Detect Page Refresh PHP
We can also use cookies in PHP to detect page refresh as seen on this code snippet :
<?php
session_start();
if (!isset($_SESSION["visits"]))
$_SESSION["visits"] = 0;
$_SESSION["visits"] = $_SESSION["visits"] + 1;
if ($_SESSION["visits"] > 1)
{
//you refreshed the page!
}
else
{
//nothing to do here!
}
Redirect on Refresh WordPress Page
To implement the redirect on refresh in WordPress we need to use the PHP approach and add this code in an action hook and give the hook an appropriate priority. So we need to do these basic steps :
- Get the page ID of the current page
- Conditionally check if we are on the page
- Check if the page was refreshed
- If the page was refreshed redirect to the destination page using the wp_redirect() function
So I put together these steps into the code snippet below :
// Hook into the head
add_action( 'wp_head', 'njengah_detect_page_refresh' );
//Callback function
function njengah_detect_page_refresh(){
//Get the page id
global $post;
$postId = $post->ID;
//Check if we are on that page
if($postId== 10 ){
//Check if the page was refreshed
$pageWasRefreshed = isset($_SERVER['HTTP_CACHE_CONTROL']) && $_SERVER['HTTP_CACHE_CONTROL'] === 'max-age=0';
//Redirect to another page if the page was refreshed
if($pageWasRefreshed){
//redirect to homepage
wp_redirect( home_url() ); exit;
}else{
//do nothing
}
}
}
In this code you should replace the page ID $postId== 10 with the respective page IDs that you want to test this condition. In my case I was testing on a page with the ID of 10.
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