How to Stop Chrome From Discarding a Specific Tab

Memory Saver frees RAM by discarding tabs you haven't touched in a while, and reloads them from scratch the moment you click back. For most tabs that's invisible. For the one tab where it actually matters — a half-written form, a livestream, a web app that keeps state in memory instead of on a server — getting silently reloaded is the exact moment it costs you something. Chrome has a specific, scoped fix for that, separate from turning Memory Saver off entirely.

Add a site to the always-active list

1. Open chrome://settings/performance (or Settings → Performance).
2. Under Memory Saver, find "Always keep these sites active."
3. Click Add, and enter the site's URL or domain.
4. Click Add to confirm.

From then on, any tab open on that site — the one you're on now, and any future tab you open there — is skipped by Memory Saver's automatic discarding. You can add as many sites as you need, and remove one later by hovering its entry in the list and clicking the trash icon.

It exempts the site, not one tab

The list works on domains, not individual tabs. If you add docs.example.com because one document tab kept losing your cursor position, every tab you ever open on that domain going forward is exempt too — there's no way to protect just today's tab and let tomorrow's get discarded normally. That's usually what you want anyway (you probably don't want any tab on your writing tool discarded mid-edit), but it's worth knowing the scope before you add a domain you visit constantly for unrelated reasons.

Why this beats turning Memory Saver off entirely

Chrome's blunter option is disabling Memory Saver altogether in the same settings page. That stops discarding everywhere, all the time — no more reload surprises on any tab, but also no more of the memory savings that made Memory Saver worth turning on in the first place across the other forty tabs you're not actively using.

The always-active list is the scoped version of the same fix: name the two or three sites where a reload actually costs you something, and leave Memory Saver doing its job on everything else. Most people only need this for a handful of domains — a webmail client mid-draft, a project-management board with an open form, a livestream tab — not their entire browsing session.

What it doesn't protect against

The exception list stops Memory Saver's routine, idle-based discarding. It does not fully override Chrome's last-resort behavior under genuine system memory pressure — if the operating system itself is critically low on RAM, Chrome can still discard tabs as a safety valve, exempted or not. The always-active list solves "Chrome discarded my tab because it sat idle for twenty minutes," not "my computer ran out of memory entirely."

It also does nothing for a crashed tab (a dead process, distinct from a discarded one) or a tab that reloads because you closed Chrome and reopened it — see Why Do My Chrome Tabs Keep Reloading Themselves? if the symptom you're chasing isn't Memory Saver at all.

When you don't actually need the exception

Not every "annoying reload" is worth exempting. If the tab is read-only — an article, a reference page, something with no in-progress input — a Memory Saver reload costs you a few seconds and nothing else; the page comes back exactly as it was. Reach for the always-active list specifically for tabs with unsaved, in-memory state: a draft that isn't auto-saved, an active upload, a page whose JavaScript holds data that a refresh would wipe out. For everything else, letting Memory Saver do its job is the better trade.

The gap the exception list doesn't close

Exempting a site keeps its tab alive in memory, but it doesn't make that tab any easier to find again later, and it does nothing once you actually do close it on purpose. If what you really wanted was to stop losing a document's context — not specifically to stop the reload — a saved, searchable copy solves it more permanently than any Memory Saver setting.

Amazing Tabs covers that half:

• Save the tab before it matters, so even a full close (not just a discard) doesn't lose your place.
• Search by title or content with ⌘K / Ctrl+K instead of hunting for which of forty tabs had the thing you needed.
• Free for up to 100 saved links, so it costs nothing to try alongside Memory Saver's own settings.

Stop losing tabs, not just discards. Add Amazing Tabs to Chrome — free, no signup to install.

Quick recap

• chrome://settings/performance → "Always keep these sites active" exempts a domain's tabs from Memory Saver's automatic discarding.
• The exception is per-site, not per-tab — every tab on that domain is covered, current and future.
• It's scoped, unlike disabling Memory Saver entirely, which stops discarding everywhere and loses the memory savings on tabs that didn't need protecting.
• It doesn't override last-resort discarding under real system memory pressure, and doesn't fix crashes or reloads unrelated to Memory Saver.
• Reserve it for tabs with real unsaved state — read-only pages don't need it.

Further reading: How to Freeze (Discard) a Tab in Chrome Manually for the opposite action — triggering a discard yourself, Why Chrome Uses So Much Memory for the full picture on Memory Saver, or Why Do My Chrome Tabs Keep Reloading Themselves? if the reload you're seeing isn't from Memory Saver at all.

Add Amazing Tabs to Chrome — free → Install from the Chrome Web Store. 100 saved links free, upgrade only if you want unlimited and cross-device sync. See pricing for the full breakdown — including the $99 lifetime deal (capped at 200 spots).