How Often Should a Page Auto Refresh? (5, 10, 30 Seconds and More)

Last updated October 28, 2026

Use the longest interval that still catches what you are waiting for. For most pages that means every 30 to 60 seconds. Ticket drops can justify 5 to 15 seconds for a few minutes, while dashboards, inboxes and staying logged in rarely need more than one reload every few minutes.

Picking an interval is a trade-off. Reload too rarely and you miss the moment a ticket, a restock or a new job post appears. Reload too often and you load the site's servers, use more data and battery, and on some sites you may get rate-limited or asked to prove you are not a robot. The table below gives sensible starting points.

What interval should I use?

What you are watching	Suggested interval	Notes
Concert or event tickets about to go on sale	5–15 seconds	Only for the few minutes around the release time.
Product restocks and flash sales	15–60 seconds	Longer if the sale is hours away.
Stock and crypto prices	10–30 seconds	Many finance sites already stream prices; check first.
Flight and hotel prices	5–15 minutes	Fares change slowly; frequent reloads add nothing.
Freelance job boards	1–3 minutes	New posts appear every few minutes at most.
Live sports scores or news	30–60 seconds	Close the tab when the event ends.
Internal dashboards and reports	1–5 minutes	Match the data’s own update schedule.
Staying logged in	5–10 minutes	Shorter than the site’s idle timeout.

Two questions help you fine-tune. First, how quickly does the page actually change? A price page that updates every minute gains nothing from a 5-second reload. Second, how fast do you need to react? If you only check the tab every few minutes anyway, a faster timer just reloads a page nobody is looking at.

Also check whether the page already updates itself. Live chat, many trading platforms and modern dashboards push new data without a reload; refreshing those can even interrupt what you are doing. Watch the page for a minute first. If the numbers change on their own, you probably don't need a timer at all, or only a slow one to recover if the connection drops.

Use cases with more detail, such as tickets, sales and job boards, are on our use cases page.

Is refreshing every 5 seconds safe?

For your computer, yes: reloading a page every few seconds will not harm your browser or your device, though it uses more data and battery. The risk is on the website's side. Each reload is a full request to the site, and twelve requests a minute from one visitor can look like automated traffic. Busy ticketing and retail sites in particular may respond with a captcha, a temporary block, or a queue page.

On your own pages, such as a status screen or an internal report, short intervals are fine as long as the server can handle them.

How do I set an exact interval?

Auto Refresh Plus takes the interval in seconds, so you can set any exact value rather than picking from a list:

1Open the page and click the Auto Refresh Plus icon in Chrome’s toolbar.
2Type the number of seconds under “Enter time in seconds”. Use the table below to convert minutes.
3Press START. To change the interval later, press STOP, type the new value and press START again.

Each tab keeps its own timer, so you can give every page the interval it deserves: 15 seconds for a restock page and 300 seconds for a dashboard in the next tab. No extension? You can set a timer in the console instead; see refreshing without an extension.

Converting minutes and hours to seconds

Every	Enter
5 seconds	5
10 seconds	10
30 seconds	30
1 minute	60
2 minutes	120
5 minutes	300
10 minutes	600
15 minutes	900
30 minutes	1800
1 hour	3600

The rule is simple: multiply minutes by 60 and hours by 3,600. If a site logs you out after 15 minutes of inactivity, a value of 600 (10 minutes) keeps you comfortably inside the limit; our guide on keeping a session alive explains why.

Still deciding which browser to do this in? The steps for Chrome are in how to auto refresh a page in Chrome.