How to Enable and Use WordPress Pagination

This method of breaking up a long form article into many smaller articles is called “Pagination”.

If you are a web-savvy marketer or even a small business owner looking for social media pointers, you have undoubtedly seen the wave of highly shareable articles that were written on websites like BuzzFeed, Cracked, the Huffington Post, and more. These articles, while definitely fun, are also written in a specific way. Rather than write long and boring articles with tons of content, the authors of these posts have split up “The Top X Widgets” articles into smaller chunks of content.

The benefit of this method is the user never feels tired while reading your post, since they are digesting smaller bits of information.

Find out how to implement pagination on your WordPress website.

This very article is an example of pagination.

Running on WordPress.org and with one simple command, this article is now paginated. What this allows me to do is segment this section on how to paginate blog posts on WordPress with another tutorial on the next page. You are able to read a few paragraphs and then move to another page if still interested.

Should I use pagination?

Using pagination is like most other SEO tips for content on the web. It truly depends, but we like pagination for longer articles and especially for content that compares different products.

Examples of articles to Paginate

• Top 10 best….
• Profiles or looks at multiple products
• Very long (over 1,500 word) articles
• Articles with loads of images

Examples of Content to NOT Paginate

• Recipes
• Reviews
• Splash pages

How to use WordPress pagination

Using pagination on your WordPress website is very simple. Assuming that your theme supports the linking of pages with content, there is no need to download any plugins or go in and mess with code. All you need to do is put in a very simple piece of code.

First, write your long article like you normally would. Once you have finished writing, navigate to the “Text” section of the WordPress editor (read: the section where you can put in HTML code).

On a new line, wherever you would like a new page to start, type in this string of code (we have provided an image above as well):

<––nextpage––>

Now, go ahead and click on the “Visual Mode” again. What you should see is a line that looks like the “More Tag” but says “Page Break”. If you see this, congratulations, you have created a new page. It is that easy.

Pagination is not working on my WordPress Website!

It is very possible that pagination will not work on your WordPress website. Why is that? WordPress looks for a certain call to be made by the WordPress theme you are using. Without this line of PHP in the proper place in your theme files, you will not so easily be able to use pagination:

<?php wp_link_pages(); ?>

For an easier time… our themes do include these functions built-in so you can paginate your posts by default using the <!–nextpage–> tag. Check them out!

Video version of this tutorial

If you prefer watching video tutorials of pagination, you can watch this video for tips from our weekly web series called PressThis.

Or, if you are all set with how to implement pagination and want to be assured that it does in fact work, let’s go to the next page to read about the plugin called Simple Pagination and its more advanced features.