Wordpress

WordPress – Please Do Not Span your Posts over Multiple Pages

I recently saw a  Wordpress tutorial on how to split up your Wordpress posts over multiple pages, please do not do this.

I agree with Thord’s post over at WPMU on “Pagination is Evil“.  I don’t understand why people would split up their posts into multiple pages so please don’t do it.  A post should contain a single focus, idea and purpose that you want to convey to your user community.  A post will flow naturally through does not need to be broken up into multiple pages.  A number of reasons why I don’t paginate my posts:

  • You break the thought process and you might as well create 2 posts instead of one.
  • Readers are lazy, they don’t want to click on the ‘Next page’ button
  • Readers are lazy, they won’t look for your <second page>
  • Readers are impatient, they don’t want to click on the next page and wait for your post to load again
  • Readers will lose interest in your post by the second page
  • Readers will lose their train of thought and might want to scroll up to see what was said above, but then they need to jump to page 1.  Again, readers are too lazy to jump pages.
  • Don’t use pagination as a way to add more advertising banners to your post.  This will only annoy your readers more.
There are probably more reasons to why you shouldn’t paginate your posts, if this is your pet peeve, let me your thoughts!

Thanks,

Elaine

One thought on “WordPress – Please Do Not Span your Posts over Multiple Pages

  1. I agree with the idea that pagination is bad. I just have one question. Although rarely, I have a post that is some sort of tutorial, with several images and lots of text. These images can sometime make the post slow to load. How would you suggest dealing with such posts. (Note that I already have reduced the images to around 200-400Kb)

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Captcha Captcha Reload