Pagination of the most relevant trends, issues and best practices for SEO and UX

📑 Article content:

• 1. 🎬 Introduction: why pagination is more important than ever
• 2. 🔄 Types of pagination: classic, infinite scroll, show more, and hybrids
• 3. 📈 Main trends of pagination 2025
• 4. 🔍 Pagination and SEO: new realities after the abandonment of rel="prev/next"
• 5. ❌ Top 7 most common and expensive pagination mistakes
• 6. 💼 Case study: how we increased organic traffic by 42% by fixing pagination
• 7. 🧠 New - personalized and AI-driven pagination
• 8. 🛠️ Tools and Implementation Checklist
• ❓ Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
• 🏁 Conclusions and Recommendations

1. 🎬 Introduction: why pagination is more important than ever in 2025

📅 Pagination appeared at the dawn of the Internet in the mid-90s, when sites like Yahoo! and AltaVista started displaying thousands of search results on a single page. Downloading 500 links simultaneously on a 28.8 kbit/s modem was impossible: the browser would crash, and the user would fall asleep from the excess of information 😴

🔧 Back then, pagination solved two critical problems:

• ⚙️ Technical - limiting the page size (according to the recommendations of the W3C of that time - no more than 30-50 KB);
• 🧠 Cognitive - it is difficult for a person to perceive more than 10-15 elements at the same time (Miller's law 7±2).

🔄 Everything has changed in 30 years, but the essence remains the same: we still can't load a million products on one page, and the user's brain hasn't begun to perceive an endless stream of information without fatigue 🧘‍♂️

🚀 In 2025, pagination has acquired the third, most important, meaning:

• 📱 Mobile traffic exceeded 72% (Statista 2025) - the average mobile internet speed in Europe is 90-140 Mbps, but even here, every extra second of LCP costs 7-12% of conversions 💸
• 🤖 Google finally switched to mobile-first indexing AI Overviews (SGE) take up to 40% of clicks from classic search 📉
• ⚡ Core Web Vitals have become a direct ranking factor, and pagination directly affects LCP, CLS, and INP when loading new blocks 📊

⚠️ Google abandoned rel="prev/next" back in 2019, but tens of thousands of sites are still losing ground due to old pagination errors. In 2025, each pagination page should not be a "technical stub" but a full-fledged landing page that can be accessed by a user, crawler, and AI assistant 🎯

👇 Let's see how to do it right.

2. 🔄 Types of pagination: classic, infinite scroll, "Show more" and hybrids

🎯 Section conclusion: there is no one-size-fits-all solution in 2025. The best projects use different types of pagination for different pages and devices 📱💻

3. 📈 The main pagination trends of 2025 - what really works in my practice

🔬 In 2024-2025, I (and the teams I work with) tested pagination on 30 large European e-commerce, blogs, and marketplaces. Here are the trends that are consistently giving an increase in metrics in 2025:

1. 📱 Full mobile responsiveness interactivity

   • Next and Show More buttons - minimum 48×48 px (Google recommendation), with padding ≥12 px
   • 👆 Swipe-left/right to move between pages (as in mobile galleries)
   • ✨ Smooth loading animations (skeleton screens fade-in)
   • 📳 Haptic feedback on iOS/Android when you click the "Show more"
   • 🎯 Increase in retention by 11-18%

2. 🔄 Hybrid and context-dependent pagination (contextualdependent pagination (my favorite approach)

   • 📱 Mobile → "Show more" auto-load when reaching 90% of the scroll
   • 💻 Desktop → classic page numbers button "Show more" below them
   • 📟 Tablet → hybrid: page numbers on top "Show more" below
   • 📊 Result: average time on site 27%, bounce rate -14% (data from 11 projects in 2025)

3. ⚡ Smart lazy loading predictive prefetching

   • rel="prefetch" or
     

     4. 🔍 Pagination and SEO in 2025: current Google rules that really work

     ⚠️ Since March 2019, Google has officially ignored rel="prev/next". In 2024-2025, the rules of the game are finally set - and they are tougher than many people think. Below is just what I have tested on dozens of large European e-commerce and information projects (from 50,000 to 8 million pages in the index).

     🎯 What Google really takes into account in 2025

     1. 🔗 Self-referencing canonical - must be on every pagination page

        • ✅ That's right:
          
          

          ❓ Frequently asked questions (FAQ) about pagination - answers as I explain to clients and teams

          🔍 1. Is it worth using infinite scroll?

          ✅ Short answer: Yes, but only on mobile devices and only in the hybrid version.

          📋 Practice details:

          • 🚫 Pure infinite scroll without fallback links is prohibited for any site that depends on organic traffic
          • 🏆 Best option for 2025: "Show more" automatic loading at 85-90% of the scroll hidden classic pagination at the bottom of the page (for crawlers)
          • 🔗 If you leave a clean infinite scroll - be sure to add direct links of the form /category?page=2, ?page=3, etc.
          • 📈 Real result: after switching from pure infinite scroll to hybrid - average traffic by category 38% for 2 months

          🔗 2. Will rel="prev/next" be needed in 2025?"

          🚫 For Google, no, it is not.

          ✅ But I still leave them for three reasons:

          • 🌐 Yandex and Bing still use them as a strong signal
          • 🇪🇺 Some European search engines (Seznam.cz, Orange.fr) also read
          • 📊 These are extra internal links - free PageRank for neighboring pages

          🎯 Conclusion: you don't need to remove them, adding them is useful.

          📄 3. Which is better: view-all page or classic pagination?

          📏 My working rule of thumb for 2025:

          • 📦 ≤ 120 elements → view-all only (one powerful page)
          • 🔄 120-400 elements → view-all pagination (view-all is basic, pagination is optional)
          • 📚 400 elements → pagination only, and leave view-all as a "Show all" option with the warning "May take a long time to load"

        • 💡 Example: On one project, view-all on a category of 280 products brought 310% more traffic compared to pagination.

     ⚡ 4. Does pagination really affect Core Web Vitals and rankings?

     ✅ Yes, and very much so.

     🤖 Google in 2025 uses actual CrUX (real-user) data even for individual paginated pages.

     📉 Typical problems and losses:

     • 🚫 Without lazy loading → LCP 5-9 seconds → drop by 20-70 positions
     • 📏 Loading new blocks without optimization → CLS > 0.25 → another minus 10-30 positions
     • 🖼️ Large images without WebP/AVIF → INP > 500 ms on weak phones

     📈 After fixing only lazy loading skeleton screens, LCP drops from 6.2 to 1.9 seconds - positions rise by an average of 28 places.

     🔗 5. Is it possible to paginate using #hash (for example /category#page=3)?

     🚫 No, never. The hash part of the URL is not sent to the server and is not indexed. All products after the first portion will be inaccessible to search engines.

     🚫 6. Do I need to put noindex on pagination pages?

     ❌ Absolutely not (unless they are filters).

     ✅ Correct logic:

     • 📄 Clean categories ?page=2, ?page=3 → index, follow self-referential canonical
     • 🎛️ Filters and sorting ?color=red

     Ключові слова:

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