Pagination Makes You The Worst Website

Matthew Gates http://notetoservices.com 4m 1,113

The views of this article are the perspective of the author and may not be reflective of Confessions of the Professions.

PLEA: Stop the Pagination

END PAGINATION NOW!

Website design is something that every web master should take pride in. Having a simple, yet easy to navigate site is one of the best things you could do for yourself and your visitors. Providing a site map is a plus for your visitors, but if your website is easy to navigate, than it is a bonus for your visitors, who probably hardly use it, because you have made your website so simple to navigate.

When people click inside your blog or website to read pages and articles, they expect to read short or fair length articles or pages. Once in a while, you can get a long with a really long article and people will actually read it, and enjoy it — whether it is based in fact, research, or just your personal opinion. There is one thing that many web masters do that they think is perfectly acceptable, and its really not. I’ll just be blunt: You are a horrible person if you think Pagination is good.

Okay, that was a little harsh. On this website alone, the front page has pagination because Infinite Scrolling is not supported, and I have over 650 articles on this website, and infinite pagination would never allow anyone to get to the very first one, though I do provide other means of getting to the very first confession on this website. On every confession or article though, no matter how long it is, and the longest is over 6,000 words on Confessions from the Blue Planet Project, there is just no pagination. Why? Because I don’t like it and I think you are grown up enough to get through the entire article if you are interested enough to do so. Go read it, it’s about aliens on this planet documented by the United States government themselves. Fascinating stuff.

Web masters tend to use pagination to gather views, keep people interested, make them go to a second page — in order to reduce their bounce time on articles, or just make their website flow with a certain style. Alright, if you paginate to a second page, you are technically still in the clear, and you can get away with it. Once you start paginating to three, four, five… ten pages, without any option to view it all as a single page, you are an asshole. The truth is: You already lost over half of your readers, especially if your site is slow or you have a lot of images on the page.

I give every website with pagination the benefit of the doubt and I make it to the second page. After that, I am already bored of having to click through yet another page. Honestly, I want to get into your article and get out as soon as possible. I want the information you want me to know. I want to take it into my brain, and then come to the end of your article as soon as possible and go do something else.

We are in the age of high speed Internet where everyone expects a webpage to load in less than a few seconds and discover the entire overview of a website in under 5 minutes, but loading 10 pages with images on it is just ridiculously still slow and painful. No one has time to look through 10 pages, no matter how good your article is, no matter how great your information is, no matter how great your website is, and no matter how curious or bored your visitors are — very few people will stick around, and if they do – they are damn troopers who did it… and fools.

More and more of these websites are popping up, especially websites that show just images, and are using pagination (without any type of Ajax script) if they present an image gallery, so that all images will show up on its own individual page. They do this because they think it will help them with SEO optimization, but in doing so, you are then not designing your website for human visitors. In my opinion, it just makes you a amateur beginner of a web developer, web designer, or web master. You have no idea what your visitors want, you have no idea how to design a website, and you are just after the search engines — which in the long run, build for a computer robot, and that will be the only audience you ever get.

Pagination is great for avoiding information overload, which is too much information presented all at once. If you are a technical website that displays pictures or talks about how to do stuff, than by all means, you are excused from using Pagination. If you are telling a story and you have several chapters or events that happened — birth, teenager, young adult, adult, old age — than you certainly can tell that story with pagination and be excused for using it.

These are the things that are allowed to have Pagination (according to me):

• Front Pages of websites
• Instructional websites such as HowStuffWorks
• Long narrative stories or articles with different stages or events that happened
• Hard cover books
• Soft cover books
• Manuals
• The Hebrew Torah

Can you imagine trying to read a book that did not have pagination? You would have to roll it out on the floor and keep rolling it up like a scroll — the Torah has a form of pagination where you have to roll it out from its side in order to read it. If nothing of yours falls into any of these categories, than you have no excuse to use pagination.

Stop the Pagination now! Stop the foolishness. Whoever told you it was a good idea for web design was wrong. If your theme comes with it and you have the ability to disable it, do so. If you do not have the ability to disable it, than find yourself a new theme. You are more likely to get better comments on one page than if you paginate to seven pages. You are more likely to hold interest in one to two pages than anymore than that.

Pagination is wrong. Just don’t do it. If you are currently using pagination on your website, it is time to rethink your design and your delivery. Start creating websites for your visitors and not for search engines. Think of your visitors as you are navigating through your own website. If you would not spend time shifting through 10 or 40 pages of pagination, don’t expect your visitors to do it, either.

Matthew Gates is a freelance web designer and currently runs Confessions of the Professions.

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