For the WordPress-specific implementation, the guide on how to add and style pagination in WordPress covers the practical setup in detail.
Pagination is the clearer win for SEO, provided it's set up correctly.
Each paginated page is indexable, linkable, and can appear independently in search results. A user searching for a specific product can land directly on page 4 of your catalog. Over time, individual pages can also accumulate their own links and ranking signals.
Lazy loading concentrates everything onto a single URL. Unless you've implemented separate paginated URLs alongside the infinite scroll (Google's recommended approach), content that loads through scrolling risks not being crawled. For a blog with hundreds of posts or a shop with thousands of products, that's a significant chunk of inventory that search engines may never see.
There's also a crawl budget consideration. Googlebot renders JavaScript in a separate queue from HTML crawling. Pages that depend on JavaScript to load their primary content take longer to process and use more crawl budget. Sites with large archives will feel this more acutely.
At Verpex, the pagination-related support tickets we see most often share the same pattern: a site owner switches to infinite scroll for the improved UX, then notices organic traffic to category and archive pages drop over the next few months. The content is still there, but it stopped getting crawled.
For a broader look at how site structure and page speed factor into rankings, the SEO tips for WordPress guide covers the technical factors worth auditing.
Which Method Is Better for User Experience?
UX depends heavily on content type and what users actually need to do on the page.
Lazy loading reduces friction. There's no action required to see more content, so browsing feels natural and continuous. This works best for homogeneous content streams where users are exploring without a specific goal: social feeds, image portfolios, and editorial news streams are natural fits.
Pagination works better when users need to find specific content, compare options across results, or return to a position they remember. When someone is shopping for a specific item, paging through results gives them a sense of progress and control. The ability to jump to page 5, or go back to "where I was before I clicked this product," actually matters for task-oriented browsing.
A pattern I notice in hosting support discussions and developer forums: developers often choose infinite scroll because it looks modern, and then spend weeks debugging why footer links are unreachable and why category pages have dropped out of search results. Most users prefer knowing how many results exist.
The "load more" button is a deliberate middle ground. Users click to load additional content rather than it loading automatically. This preserves some of the engaged feel of infinite scroll while giving users explicit control over what they see.
For SEO purposes, a "load more" implementation still needs separate paginated URLs for crawlers, even if those URLs are hidden from the visible interface. The visible experience can be click-to-load; the underlying architecture still needs to be crawlable.
This approach works well for product listings and blog feeds where a continuous feel is desirable but search engine visibility matters. It also degrades more gracefully on slow connections: users who click and wait know something is loading, rather than wondering if the page is broken.
How Do You Choose Between Lazy Loading and Pagination?
If SEO and content discovery are core priorities, pagination gives you the crawlable foundation you need. You can layer JavaScript enhancements on top for a better browsing experience, but start from a base of indexable pages.
Use lazy loading when:
Your content is primarily visual and doesn't need to rank individually (portfolios, image feeds)
Users are browsing rather than looking for specific items
You're targeting mobile-first audiences where continuous scrolling feels natural
SEO for that specific content section isn't a priority
Use pagination when:
You need all content indexed by search engines
Users need to navigate to specific positions, compare across multiple pages, or return to a spot
You have deep content archives (blog posts, product catalogs, documentation — here's a guide on how to write a good blog post if you're building that kind of archive)
Accessibility matters (screen readers and keyboard navigation handle pagination much better than infinite scroll)