You may have observed infinite scrolling on some blogs. On such websites or blogs there’s no need to click on the page numbers for navigating from one page to another, as the user can just scroll down and next page will load automatically. Thus user interaction is least required and in many cases, user will read more content compared to the traditional way in which the user needs to click on the “next page” or page numbers.
When the user reaches to the bottom of the page, next page will be automatically generated. In the process of loading next page, a loading bar will be displayed for a few seconds. The page doesn’t refresh and next posts will load up automatically. This way, user can read hundreds of posts without the need to even refresh the page or click anywhere.
If you’re wondering whether this is a new technique which is just developed, then the answer is no. You’ve already seen and used this technique on Facebook and Twitter for example. Just reach to the bottom of the page, and the next page is ready for you. Also it increases time spent on a page as the content loads fast, compared to traditional way.
How to Add Infinite Scroll in WordPress
The process is not that complex as it seems. Download and install Infinite Scroll plugin. In most cases this plugin should start working without changing any settings. To test this, open your front-end and check if you can see the loading bar and whether next posts are loading properly or not.
Go to settings > Infinite Scroll. From the “Generals” tab you can enable the infinite scroll mode for everyone or for admin only, change loading image, align image, change text and can do much more.
If you’re facing problem in the functionality, then you’ll need to adjust the “selectors”. To do this, click on the “selectors” tab.
This plugin will fill out the selectors based on current WordPress coding standards. Upon testing it with the default Twenty Ten theme, this plugin worked flawlessly and no settings were required to be changed. But depending on your theme, you may need to change content selector and posts selector. In most cases, you won’t need to change the navigation selector and next page selector.
Note that this functionality is added only in the home page and not in the category or tag archives page.
If you’re thinking to add similar functionality on your WordPress blog, then this plugin will save you time and resources to integrate infinite scrolling. You can download this plugin from below link.
Download Infinite Scroll from official WordPress plugins library.