I am working on a site where the pages are HTML and they interact with the server using Ajax calls. This works great - the pages are responsive and page loads are minimized.
What's the best way to deal with a cached HTML page when the API has changed? Tell the pages to never cache? This would work, but it would slow things down.
Any other suggestions?
If you don't want something to be cached, don't let it be cached. This won't slow things down for most applications in the way you describe... you're only loading that page once per session.
Another thing to worry about is what to do when a user has the page up but the backend server has been updated. A common method is for the client to include a version parameter with its requests. The API can then request the client to reload if a newer version is available.