Pagination divides a large set of content — blog archives, search results, product listings — across multiple separate pages, rather than displaying everything on a single, very long page. It's a common way to keep both load times and general readability manageable.
Common Uses for Pagination
- Blog archive pages, showing a set number of posts per page
- Product category pages in a WooCommerce store
- Comment sections on especially popular, high-engagement posts
- Search results pages, breaking a large result set into manageable chunks
Pagination and SEO
- Each individual paginated page should have its own genuinely unique URL
- Clear "previous" and "next" navigation helps both visitors and search engines move between pages correctly
- Avoid duplicate content issues by properly configuring canonical tags across a paginated series
Pagination vs. Infinite Scroll
- Pagination — content is split across distinct, individually navigable pages
- Infinite scroll — new content loads continuously and automatically as a visitor scrolls further down
WordPress handles basic pagination automatically for blog archives, while plugins like WP-PageNavi offer more advanced, customizable pagination controls when the built-in default isn't quite enough.
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