You can accomplish this by editing the HTML of your page, and adding a little JavaScript.
Note
These buttons won't work if the user has no browsing history. For example, if the user opens your page in a new browser tab or window, nothing will happen when they click the button.
Using history.back
In a web browser, the built-in JavaScript object window has an object called history containing the URLs a user has visited in their current browser window. You can use the history.back() method to tell the browser to go back to the user's previous page.
One way to use this JavaScript is to add it to the onclick event attribute of a button. Here, we create the button using a <form> element, containing an <input> element of the button type.
Insert the following HTML into your web page:
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- <form>
- <input type="button" value="Go back!" onclick="history.back()">
- </form>
Using history.go
The history.go() method tells the browser to go to a specific page in the user's browsing history. You can specify which history item by putting a number inside the parentheses. With computer programming, this is called an argument.
If you specify the number -1 as your argument, the browser goes back one page in the browser's history. Here's the same code as above, using history.go(-1) instead of history.back().
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- <form>
- <input type="button" value="No, really, go back!" onclick="history.go(-1)">
- </form>