Pagination is the act of splitting large volumes of content on a website into discrete pages. It’s a part of the user interface (UI) design process that aims to add structure to your site and, thus, improve user experience.
In this guide, we’ll explore the role of this concept in user experience (UX), discuss the most common mistakes, and share with you some pagination UX best practices to help improve your site and deliver an excellent experience.
Why Pagination Matters in UX
The baseline principle of this content-loading tactic is to break down a significant volume of content into digestible sections, thus ensuring that users are not overwhelmed by a huge amount of data on one page. Respectively, pagination design has a massive impact on UX.
There are a few benefits that it can offer:
- Reducing cognitive load. Seeing huge volumes of data on one page that will require excessive scrolling typically feels very overwhelming to users. Seeing a limited number of items, on the contrary, reduces cognitive load and lets users focus on the content they see.
- Improved navigation. Pagination system can help users find the needed information and navigate through a website more easily. Besides, it gives them more control, letting users get back to where they stopped during the previous visit.
- Better indexing. Some other content-loading techniques can make your content appear less wholesome and more confusing to search engine bots, leading to difficulties in the process of crawling and indexing it. Breaking your content into bite-sized pieces using pagination makes it more organized and easier to read. Over time, search bots can index each page individually.
Pagination vs. Infinite Scroll vs. Load More
Although the aforementioned benefits of this content-loading approach are real, of course, it’s not the only UI approach that can be used. Other techniques, such as infinite scroll and load more, may also come in handy depending on content type and specific user goals.
Let’s briefly compare them.
Pagination
This approach means splitting your content into separate pages. It is best for goal-oriented users who are looking for specific data. It’s also good for seamless navigation and SEO.
Examples: Google search results, e-commerce product listings, etc.
Infinite Scroll
This technique implies that the website will load more content automatically as users scroll down the page. It’s best for casual browsing and uninterrupted user experience. It’s also good for sites with large volumes of content (e.g. social media) and for ensuring mobile-friendliness.
Examples: Instagram feed, news sites like Buzzfeed, etc.
Load more
This content-loading technique allows users to view more content by clicking a “Load more” button. This technique offers the most balanced UX by reducing interruptions found in pagination and giving more control than infinite scroll. It’s also good for mobile-friendliness and optimal load time.
Examples: e-commerce category pages like on AliExpress, image galleries like Freepik, etc.
UX Principles for Effective Pagination
If, after evaluating different options, you decide that this method of content loading is right for you, there are a few core principles to keep in mind while designing it. Namely, the following UX concepts lay at the heart of good pagination:
- Consistency in placement & design. It’s important to use consistent design and location of navigational elements on every page. For example, it’s common to place number-based and/or arrow-based navigation at the bottom of the page.
- Visual hierarchy. To give users more control, you need to ensure that the page they’re currently on stands out visually from the others in navigation.
- Clear navigation. It’s important to provide users with a clear understanding of where they are in your content database and convenient navigation tools to browse through it.
- Mobile-friendliness. Finally, if you implement this content-loading technique, it’s crucial to make it friendly to mobile users. Implement a responsive design that truncates excessive page links for easier navigation on mobile. Also, ensure the proper size and clickability of buttons and allow simple transitions to the beginning or end of the list.
Common Mistakes & How to Avoid Them
Implementing an effective pagination design should be easy if you adhere to the aforementioned UX principles. Yet, there are a number of common mistakes that often get in the way.
Let’s review some of the biggest errors that result in bad pagination and discuss ways to avoid them:
1. Ignoring SEO-Friendly Pagination
While this form of content presentation is generally good for indexing and SEO, neglecting the basic optimization principles when designing it can do more harm than good. For example, omitting SEO can lead to duplicate content that won’t be indexed and crawling issues that can hinder your rankings.
How to avoid: To reinforce your pagination methods with SEO and ensure they are indexed correctly, you need to use best practices like proper usage of canonical tags, logical linking structures, and avoiding content duplication. SE Ranking’s guide on pagination in SEO provides an in-depth breakdown of SEO best practices to improve user experience and search rankings.
2. Inconsistent Design
As was mentioned earlier, consistency is one of the core UX design principles that contributes to a smooth experience. When you have different navigation designs on different parts of your site, it can look confusing to users and disrupt their browsing flow. Thus, it’s important to ensure consistency at all times.
How to avoid: First, decide on the specific pagination pattern that you want to use. Then, apply the same placement, navigation flow, and style all across your site.
3. Too Many Page Links
When you have large volumes of content that can be broken into dozens and even hundreds of pages, it can ultimately overwhelm users if they see three-digit numbers in the navigation bar. This can make it feel like the volume of information you provide is simply indigestible and make visitors think they will not be able to find what they are looking for.
How to avoid: Limit the number of visible page links to a less-overwhelming number, for example, 10, and provide “Next” and “Previous” buttons to prevent getting your visitors overwhelmed.
Poor Mobile Usability
According to Statista, 95.8% of people worldwide use mobile devices to browse the Internet, in contrast to only 62.9% of those who prefer laptops or desktops. These numbers show that a large share of your site’s visitors will likely come from mobile and you have to make your site mobile friendly to retain them. Unfortunately, many brands forget about optimizing their pagination design when building a mobile-friendly site.
How to avoid: Implement responsive design to make sure your links appear right-sized, visible, and easily clickable for small screens so that users don’t have to zoom in.
4. Lack of Accessibility
The World Health Organization reports an estimated 1.3 billion people (roughly 16% of the world’s population) have some form of disability. These people need special accessibility features to have complete and seamless web experiences, and overlooking these needs when designing is a huge mistake.
How to avoid: Implement friendly pagination that’s supported by screen readers, and that can be navigated using a keyboard.
5. Not Highlighting the Current Page
For maximum control and seamless UX, users should always know where exactly they are in your content system. Thus, not creating a visual hierarchy that highlights the current page is a massive mistake.
How to avoid: Use a different color, underlining, or bold text to highlight the current page.
6. Not Preserving User State
Lastly, when a user clicks on a piece of content from the menu and gets back, they expect their previous state to be preserved. Not doing this and resetting them back to page 1 can greatly undermine UX.
How to avoid: Ensure that users always get back to the same spot in the navigational system instead of leading them back to the first page. This is especially important when visitors are navigating large, data-heavy sites and applications that feature table pagination because it can be incredibly easy to get lost in them.
Best Practices & Well-Designed Pagination Examples
Now that you know about the common mistakes and how to avoid them to ensure optimal UX, let’s take a look at a few pagination design examples that combine positive UX and SEO practices for brand success.
The first example is from the world of e-commerce. iHerb is a large and popular online store of supplements, sports, beauty, and other products. Having a huge range of products, iHerb needed a solution that would ensure positive UX and seamless navigation while also helping visitors view product listings in digestible pieces. And they implemented numbered pagination. This solution has made the shopping experience simple and convenient. At the same time, iHerb actively implements SEO practices by integrating relevant keywords into their product titles, descriptions, and other content on the site.
The next example is a news site. The Financial Times is a large news site that covers a huge volume of news from categories like business, tech, markets, climate, and many others. Having an enormous volume of content, this site also implemented a convenient numbered pagination that lets readers navigate through specific news categories with ease. Pay attention to how this site only specifies only one-page number instead of overwhelming users with lots of links. This way, the website also created a more dynamic experience and enhanced the time spent on it.
While both these websites implemented the same form of content loading, they rank well in search engines and receive traffic. This is because they adhered to Google’s best practices, such as
- Linking pages sequentially
- Using correct, unique URLs
- Avoiding indexing URLs with filters or alternative sort orders
Summary
Pagination can help improve user experience and SEO for sites with large volumes of content. When implemented right, it can offer such benefits as:
- Reduced cognitive load
- Better navigation
- Improved site crawling and indexing
Yet, in order to gain all these benefits, it’s important to approach the design of your navigation both with SEO and UX in mind. This means avoiding such common mistakes as inconsistency in design, lack of SEO best practices, an overwhelming number of page links, lack of accessibility, and others.
After reading this guide, you have a list of common mistakes with tips on how to avoid them and examples of successful use cases of this content-loading technique. Use this knowledge to enhance your own site and deliver better UX.
