Pagination vs Infinite Scroll – Which is Better

Let us talk about an important and exciting topic today.  There are different ways a designer and developer choose to represent their ideas on a website.  

A lot of the time these ideas go into the user experience and developers give a lot of thought to what kind of user experience visitors are going to have.

One of the crucial ways in which a developer can infinitely increase the user experience is by optimising the navigation of a website.  If you want to create a website that is easily navigable then it will serve quite a lot of purposes.

• Firstly, you are going to have a visitor who would be quite pleased because they can navigate and use the website easily.

• Secondly, after the visitor can use the website properly, they can finally choose to buy the product they want which will positively impact your business.

• And thirdly all these will give your website a good reputation as well as a good ranking wherein people can find the web content they want.

Having optimised navigation also means the Google bots and Google crawlers won’t have a hard time and crawling issues while navigating the website. It is easy on robot.txt as well.

Today we are going to talk about the two most popular ways of navigation that developers tend to use, pagination vs infinite scroll.

What Is Pagination?

This is probably one of the oldest and the most popular forms of navigation out there.

As the name suggests, pagination simply means that the web page or the content page is being divided into different pages for ease of use.

These different pages can be linked usually below the homepage by numbers denoting which page you are on.

These pages also have individual URLs for easy navigation and easy sharing.

You can find this type of navigation on the Google search page as well as different popular pages including pages for online shopping.

This is a good type of navigation and there are various benefits of pagination, and this type of navigation usually avoids duplicate content issues.

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What Is Infinite Scroll?

This is a new type of navigation technique and it usually is quite easy to understand from the name itself.  Infinite navigation is when the webpage continues to keep on loading as you scroll down.

This type of navigation technique is quite popular for social media feeds wherein people like to keep scrolling and the results keep popping up.

This type of navigation is also friendly to the eyes and there are various other benefits of infinite scroll.

Let’s Find Out The Pros And Cons of Both These Types of Navigation Techniques

Both infinite scroll and pagination are good ways of navigation and it totally depends upon the use case scenario for which they are used.

User Participation

User participation is one of the most important reasons for designing and navigation philosophy and techniques.

The user engagement is something that keeps a company alive and this is what the developers aim to achieve.  While both types of navigations encourage people to participate in the experience, these two navigations are used for different use case scenarios.

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Pagination navigation is used primarily for websites wherein people need to find the appropriate content they are looking for.  These may be mostly eCommerce websites and other information websites.

Infinite scroll is mostly and largely used by social media companies simply because the design philosophy and use case are quite different when it comes to social media.

In social media, the users do not have a specific goal to adhere to, nor a specific content that they need to find. That is why social media apps and websites have infinite scrolls so that they can have unlimited content.

While both have their advantages and disadvantages, in the case of pagination the interface might feel a little less smooth because the users have to click on a new page quite often.

In the case of infinite scroll, if the user wants to find something then it will be harder for them since it is one whole single page and they have to remember where is that content instead of going to that page.

User-Friendliness

When we talk about user-friendliness between pagination vs infinite scroll then the user-friendliness question is kind of settled.

Both styles of strolling are intended for their individual use case and they have been designed with the use case in mind.

When users are using social media then infinite scroll is more user-friendly to them and that is what they get.

When they are on an e-commerce website then they expect to find content on pages and that is what they get.

The problem arises when users browse social media and find pagination instead of infinite scroll and vice versa as that can be problematic.

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Visual Friendliness

This is what often gets missed out and that is visual friendliness. What we mean by visual friendliness is the ability of a website or an app to be visually appealing to the user.

Some might consider this a part of the user-friendliness but we have chosen to keep it separate due to the fact that visual appeal is a point in itself.

Whenever someone is browsing social media, they require a smooth visual appeal wherein everything flows around and that includes the stories videos, and everything which they can simply scroll.

When someone is on a commerce website or a trading website such as ftmo passing ea then they do not need this level of fluidity and they can make do even with the simple interface of pagination.

Implementation

Till this point, we were talking from the point of view of the users. This point will focus on the development side of things.

Pagination is generally chosen by the developers because it is an easier process to implement and they can be sure that the content will be segregated properly and visible.

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Infinite scroll on the other hand is a bit more difficult to implement because the strolling requires features that need to be added later on which might be a bit more difficult.

So, this was the blog about pagination vs infinite scroll.  If you are someone who wants to create a commercial website, a social media website, or any other type of website hire a dedicated web design company that will make sure all your digital needs are covered as we will assist you in everything you desire.