Comments on: Pagination and Page-View Juicing are Evil

By: Zen

Zen — Tue, 11 Sep 2012 00:31:30 +0000

This also applies to ‘slideshows’ that are used to paginate content. Stupid stuff like “10 Ways to improve your resume: ” has 14 slides: an introductory slide, the end slide, two ad slides in the middle, then the content- which of course has a title and only two sentences of content.
It’s not Flash, javascript, or hmtl pagination either, each slide represents an entirely separate page (pageview!).

(I didn’t read all the comments, but I don’t think this has been mentioned yet. Sorry for the necro, StumbleUpon brought me here)

By: Sault Web Design

Sault Web Design — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 23:12:56 +0000

I agree with most of what you said, although I do think there is a case for pagination in some cases.

News Articles should be never

Technical Articles with multiple stages I can see having them that way you can break the reading up if your learning somthing new and it already has predefined spots to stop.

But I agree 100% that if all you are doing is trying to juice pages or get more ads its just bad practice.

By: iggdawg

iggdawg — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 16:03:47 +0000

I’d like to ad an amen to this. The text in a given article would take a 56k user a moment to download. If it’s them you’re worried about, ease up on the ads and graphics content. I mean, if you’re really worried enough about slow connection users to force everyone to deal with it. I recently installed the Auto Pager firefox extensions, which loads pages-to-be automagically. It’s been awesome having it do the clicking for me. I realize this in essence loads all the pages and all the ads, thereby justifying the pagination… but I’m just so sick of having to deal with stupid website layouts that I’m more concerned with getting my content delivered to me than anything. its not like I click ads anyways.

I’ll also agree that this is a text only argument. I don’t think anyone would debate that galleries need to be paginated. I just got done totally reworking my image gallery script since my pics/misc folder got to be too much of a beast for a monolithic page.

Anyways, well written article. I’m glad I’m not the only one that can’t stand this.

By: bjarke

bjarke — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 09:54:32 +0000

imagine google without pagination.. I dont think I want to wait for 1.000.000 results to be rendered on the page :)

By: Mike D.

Mike D. — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 21:47:21 +0000

Mike: It may be true that some people convince themselves that that is a good reason, but it isn’t. As mentioned above, the actual article text of a page usually makes up a very small percentage of the load time.

By: Mike

Mike — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 15:44:28 +0000

Nice article, I think that some people split up articles because alot of people have slow connections and it takes them a while to load the page. I just put the whole article on one page.

By: Mike D.

Mike D. — Sun, 28 Dec 2008 06:39:53 +0000

Atmosk: I’m not opposed to “advancement and overall self betterment” at all. Quite the opposite. I just happen to think your thoughts on pagination are a step backwards, so I — and probably 99% of other blog authors — don’t employ them. That is the beauty of the internet. You can publish one way and I can publish another. And anyone can denounce or support any method they choose to.

By: Atmosk

Atmosk — Sun, 28 Dec 2008 06:32:17 +0000

Thinking is not to agree or disagree… that is voting. -Robert Frost.
I am just offering constructive criticism. I don’t understand how a ‘seemingly’ established author such as your self can be so opposed to advancement and overall self betterment.

By: Mike D.

Mike D. — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 23:49:24 +0000

Atmosk: Ok, well in that case we’ll just have to agree to disagree. I think splitting up a tiny 600 word article into multiple pages is insulting to the audience… which is essentially the point of this entire article.

By: Atmosk

Atmosk — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 20:59:57 +0000

I am not trying to contradict your article… It is just some constructive criticism. If nothing else you should provide a short synopsis of the article and have a “read on” link. This would improve the flow of your website and entice more people to read your article.

By: Greg

Greg — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 08:47:49 +0000

I only read the first few paragraphs of this. I needed a page break to give me a pause. I can’t do without them…

By: Mike D.

Mike D. — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 05:44:55 +0000

Atmosk: The entire post is less than 600 words long. It’s only one screen tall on a standard iMac monitor. Less than two screens on a laptop. What you’re suggesting is exactly what I’m denouncing in this post. Breaking up articles (especially incredibly short articles like this one) into multiple pages does not improve the flow at all… it retards it. Hitting your spacebar to scroll down is a lot easier than repeatedly locating a Next Page link and then moving your mouse to it and then re-scrolling to the top of the article text of whatever page you’re on.

By: Atmosk

Atmosk — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 05:16:22 +0000

no no…. I read it I just think that the page layout could be improved by splitting it up into a few different pages. You know improve the flow a little. Just some constructive criticism thats all.

By: Mike D.

Mike D. — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 01:28:50 +0000

Atmosk: Did you even read the article? Or are you being sarcastic…

By: Atmosk

Atmosk — Fri, 26 Dec 2008 18:11:13 +0000

Great article, but you could probably improve the layout of this page by adding a navigation tool bar towards the bottom. That way there wouldn’t be so much information on one page and you could split it up improving the readability of the article. Just a thought.