Are you searching for add pagination in WordPress? If yes, then your search ends here! This article will teach you to set up custom pagination in your WordPress blog.
Pagination is an important aspect of any website, allowing visitors to navigate easily from one page to another. It’s even more important for WordPress websites, which can contain hundreds or even thousands of posts.
By default, WordPress comes with its own pagination system that works perfectly fine, but if you want more control over how the pagination looks and works, you can set up your own custom pagination in WordPress.
In this blog post, we’ll discuss how to do just that. We’ll cover setting up custom pagination manually or by using plugins.
Let’s get started!
What Is Pagination in WordPress?
WordPress pagination is the process of dividing content into discrete pages. It is most commonly used in blog posts, but can also be used in other content types like products and news articles.
Pagination is a great way to improve the user experience on your website by making it easier to navigate large pieces of content. It can also help improve your website’s SEO by allowing Google to index more pages on your site.
This is how pagination in WordPress looks like:
As you can see in the above image, instead of showing all the posts on one page, this website owner decided to show only a few number of posts on one page and divided the rest of the posts on the other pages.
Benefits of WordPress Pagination
There are a number of benefits to using pagination on a WordPress site. Perhaps the most obvious benefit is that it helps to keep your content organized and easy to navigate.
If you have a lot of content on your site, pagination can help to break it up into manageable chunks so that users can easily find what they’re looking for. Here are the top benefits of using pagination on your website:
1. Improved User Experience
WordPress pagination can improve user experience on a website by making it easier for users to navigate through multiple pages of content. This includes pages with blog posts, galleries, and other types of content.
WordPress pagination also makes it easier for users to jump between different sections of a website quickly, allowing them to find exactly what they are looking for faster.
Additionally, WordPress pagination can also help reduce the amount of clutter on a page, making it easier to read and navigate.
2. Improved Performance
WordPress pagination can also be a strategy to improve a site’s performance because slow loading of content can also negatively affect a site’s performance. Here, pagination can also help you!
This is because a single page with a lot of content can take longer to load than several smaller pages. By splitting up your content into separate pages, you can help to ensure that your site loads quickly and efficiently.
For example, if you have 100 blog posts and are trying to load all 100 blogs on your primary blog page, then it might load very slowly as that’s a lot of data to load.
However, if you break up the list into 10 pages of 10 posts each, every page will load much faster as you have decreased the amount of content on each page.
3. Improved SEO
Another benefit of pagination is that it can help to improve your site’s SEO. By splitting up content into multiple pages, search engine crawlers can more easily find and index each page, potentially leading to higher rankings.
By making it easier for users to find what they’re looking for, pagination helps reduce bounce rates and improve engagement levels, which can help boost SEO rankings.
Also, Pagination creates an internal link structure that allows crawlers to navigate through your website.
How to Setup WordPress Pagination Manually
You can also set up and control paginations manually with a few settings and custom codes. It is recommended to only those who have some experience working with custom codes in WordPress.
You can use this method if you are looking to add pagination without using any third-party tools or plugins or if you are building your own custom theme.
Before starting, you should know that there are two different types of pagination: Preview Posts and Next Posts and page numbers like (Prev 1 2 3 … 15 Next). Now, let’s start!
By default, WordPress offers pagination to each site. Also, you can control the number of blogs to display on each page. To configure this setting, go to “Settings > Reading” and enter the number of blogs to display under “Blog pages show at most” By default, WordPress displays 10 blog posts on each page.
Dividing WordPress Posts or Pages Into Multiple Pages
In the above guide, we have learned how to break a blog listing page into multiple pages. However, WordPress also allows you to break your posts or pages into multiple pages.
This can be beneficial in some situations. For example, if you have a blog with 50k or even more words of content then it is the best practice to break it into multiple pages with less content that helps boost user experience.
You can perform this action in both the Gutenberg editor and the Classic editor. First, let’s see how to do it in the block editor. First, open any post or page and navigate to the section from where you want to break the page. Next, add a block named “Page Break”.
That’s it; your lengthy content is divided into multiple pages that users can navigate through pagination.
Now, preview your post to see if the page break is working or not. In my case, it is working perfectly, as you can see in the above image.
Now, let’s see the same process if you are using the Classic editor. Open any post or page, place your mouse cursor where you want to break your page, and enter <!–nextpage–> as shown in the above image.
How to Setup WordPress Pagination Using Plugin
One of the easiest ways to set up WordPress pagination is to use a plugin. WP-PageNavi is an excellent plugin that allows you to add pagination to your website with ease.
To install this plugin, go to “Plugins > Add New” and search for “WP-PageNavi” in the search box as shown in the above image. After that, install and activate the plugin.
Next, you need to configure the pagination on your site by navigating to “Settings > PageNavi”. On the next screen, you will see a few settings that allow you to change the displayed text on a total number of pages, current page, first page, last page, and more.
Moreover, this plugin also allows you to change the styles of your pagination. To do this, you can simply select “Yes” under “Use pagination-css.css”. Moreover, you also choose the pagination style from the Normal or Drop-down List options. You can keep the rest of the settings as it is.
Alternate Plugins to Setup WordPress Pagination
WP-PageNavi is not the only plugin that helps you set up pagination in WordPress. There are a few other plugins that come with more configuration settings and provide more control over the pagination. Here are a few options available:
- WP-Paginate: It is a simple plugin that allows you to add pagination to the site with minimal configurations. It also offers various customization features like changing the color of pagination buttons, adding custom text, and more.
- Pagination by BestWebSoft: This plugin allows you to add pagination to blogs, search results, categories, tags, archives, and author pages. You can also choose different pagination positions. Moreover, change the hover color, background color, text color, border color, and much more.
- Alphabetic Pagination: This plugin enables you to add pagination with alphabetical characters like A, B, C, and so on. It allows you to enable pagination on posts, pages, and taxonomies.
Wrapping Up!
Now that you know how to add pagination in WordPress, you can make your site more user-friendly and engaging. I hope that with this article, you will be able to add pagination to your WordPress site.
If you have any questions or concerns about adding pagination to your blog, don’t hesitate to comment below. Thank you for reading, and I hope you find this article useful!
