I was discussing this problem with my client. Long time ago pagination was obligatory because of users who didn't want to scroll down they screens for half an hour. They didn't want to wait while page was loading - it have to be fast.

But today we have great broadband Internet connection so pages loads very fast.

I don't like pagination on smartphone or tablet. I often have to zoom page numbers to change it.

A few pieces of information about category pages from my Google Analytics:
first pages: 45% of total pageviews
second pages: 6% of total pageviews
third pages: 3% of total pageviews

I think more products will be seen by customer whithout pagination.
It also may be good for search engines to index content faster.

What do you think?

Yes, it is annoying on devices.

Maybe you can look into something like Infinite scroll?

 

I was discussing this problem with my client. Long time ago pagination was obligatory because of users who didn't want to scroll down they screens for half an hour. They didn't want to wait while page was loading - it have to be fast.

 

But today we have great broadband Internet connection so pages loads very fast.

 

I don't like pagination on smartphone or tablet. I often have to zoom page numbers to change it.

 

A few pieces of information about category pages from my Google Analytics:

first pages: 45% of total pageviews

second pages: 6% of total pageviews

third pages: 3% of total pageviews

 

I think more products will be seen by customer whithout pagination.

It also may be good for search engines to index content faster.

 

What do you think?

Could try a drop down of page numbers or the infinite scroll thing mentioned

 

I was discussing this problem with my client. Long time ago pagination was obligatory because of users who didn't want to scroll down they screens for half an hour. They didn't want to wait while page was loading - it have to be fast.

 

But today we have great broadband Internet connection so pages loads very fast.

 

I don't like pagination on smartphone or tablet. I often have to zoom page numbers to change it.

 

A few pieces of information about category pages from my Google Analytics:

first pages: 45% of total pageviews

second pages: 6% of total pageviews

third pages: 3% of total pageviews

 

I think more products will be seen by customer whithout pagination.

It also may be good for search engines to index content faster.

 

What do you think?

 

Not to point out the obvious but design the mobile site to use appropriate navigation to suit the device?

Not to point out the obvious but design the mobile site to use appropriate navigation to suit the device?

Or this lol which makes more since

I like infinite scroll

The point is, it's easy to change paging in non e-commerce website (galleries, posts, comments, etc).
I wondering do you have any experience how it affects the conversion?

I think it depends on the site, and the sort of interactions your users are having with it. Also, you can only ever justify an argument for it either way when you have done A/B testing and shown that it works or doesn't.

 

Here are some interesting reads on pagination vs infinite scrolling:

 

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/03/the-end-of-pagination.html

http://danwin.com/2013/01/infinite-scroll-fail-etsy/

http://www.wptavern.com/good-or-bad-infinite-scrolling

 

Definitely worth reading those three. The instance with Etsy is interesting, and the write up is very informative and gets you thinking.

 

Perhaps, in the case of the OP, the problem isn't pagination and the lack of click throughs is down to the initial page not being promising enough. Maybe instead of giving the users less work, you should actually be working on getting the best results up or give them a reason to keep searching. Alternatively, maybe the fact that they are satisfied with the first page is the reason for them not continuing, which means everything is good.

 

Really, it all comes down to the individual site and what the stats say.

 

A bit more OT: Personally, when it comes to e-commerce there are lot of downsides to infinite scrolling, as explained in the Etsy article. But websites/apps like Pinterest or Twitter benefit from an infinite scroll instead of using pagination.

 

Edit #2: The user interaction with the service is an important factor. If the user is browsing, for example twitter but it could apply to e-commerce such as just browsing a clothing shop (Case Study: my sister haha) then the infinite scroll may benefit user experience. However, if the user is shopping for something specific then having items on a knowable page (e.g. "I saw it on page 3 of this site") then that helps the user shop around. This may seem bad; you don't want the user buying from somewhere else, but it's how people shop. I know I do. If I come back to your site to check the price of something and have to scroll on through searching for it then I might just give up and buy it elsewhere.

Edited April 11, 201313 yr by heydanreeves

I used Infinite scroll and it really worked well for me.

Horses for courses but classic pagination works well in many situations so I personally start with pagination in mind and then think would infinite scroll be a better option. In most e-commerce cases if you need more than one page for that many products the user would probably want a filter rather than infinite scroll to narrow the results - amazon and ebay for classic examples. Just my thoughts.

I hate infinite scroll. I usually click on 'view 200' per page but still prefer pagination. I like to know where I am, and Infinite scroll doesn't let me. I can tolerate it on Twitter and the like, but a big no from me on ecommerce websites.

Edited April 12, 201313 yr by WebTam

Not to point out the obvious but design the mobile site to use appropriate navigation to suit the device?

 

I am with this suggestion since infinite scroll really does not work well for me. But, that's personal preference.

Here's what I know about pagination in SEO points of view:

 

When is Pagination Necessary?

When a site grows beyond a few dozen pages of content in a specific category or subcategory, listing all of the links on a single page of results can make for unwieldy hard-to-use pages that seem to scroll indefinitely (and can cause long load times as well).

 

But, usability isn't the only reason pagination exists. For many years, Google's recommended that pages contain no more than 100 links (internal or external) in order to make it easy for spiders to reach down deep into a site's architecture. Many SEOs have found that this "limit" isn't hard and fast, but staying within that general range remains a best practice. Hence, pages that contain many hundreds or thousands of links may inadvertently be hurting the access of search engines to the content-rich pages in the list making pagination essential.

 

source of this is from semoz. sorry can't post the url I ma not yet allowed to do so.

 

The

Do's in Pagination:

• Try to link to as many pages of the pagination structure as possible without breaking the 100(ish) links per page limit
• Show newer content at the top of the results list when possible, as this means the most link juice will flow to newer articles that need it (and are temporally relevant)
• Use and link to relevant/related categories & subcategories to help keep link juice flowing throughout the site
• Link back to the top results from each of the paginated URLs

Don'ts

 

• Show only a few surrounding paginated links from paginated URLs - you want the engines to be able to crawl deeper from inside the structure
• Link to only the pages at the front and end of the paginated listings; this will flow all the juice to the start and end of results, ingoring the middle
• Try to randomize the paginated results shown in an effort to distribute link juice; you want a static site architecture the engines can crawl
• Try to use AJAX to get deeper in the results sets - engines follow small snippets of Javascript (sometimes), but they're not at a point where this is an SEO best practice
• Go over the top trying to get every paginated result linked-to, as this can appear both spammy and unusably ugly

Hope this helps.

I found I had a similar problem on my web portfolio as people weren't looking at my older work because it's on page 2, 3, 4 etc. I opted for lazy load...

 

http://www.retroedgewebdesign.co.uk/web-portfolio/

 

Everything is on the one page but not effected by load time, it seems to be working quite well so I may adopt this method for e-commerce sites and remove the need for pagination altogether.

Just tagging a related question on the back of this to save a new thread. I was wondering on how many results per page people favor? I know it's a mixture depending on size of content etc and yes the show x per page is cool but as the default initial load of products? For example amazon.co.uk use 16, google 10, eBay 50. Also could the number be a positive or negative impact from the old seo potential of the content?