What is Pagination? And How to Implement it on Your Website

Each request not only retrieves data but also returns a cursor pointing to the start of the next data segment. Web pagination is something every web user takes for granted, but for developers a lot of consideration goes into implementing it. The web pagination mechanism will automatically improve responsiveness of the system, user experience, and may reduce clutter on the page.

The most relevant pages should always be a few links away from the landing or the pillar page. You can even use breadcrumbs to make it easily identifiable to the users. In fact, GraphQL has built-in support for cursor-based pagination through the Relay specification. This allows you to easily implement efficient, reliable pagination in your GraphQL applications.

Adding Pagination Links Using HATEOAS

However, need to be careful in how you implement it, in order to serve both your users and search engines effectively. The choice between numbered pagination and ‚Load More‘ buttons depends on the specific needs of your website and its users. Each method has its strengths and is suited to different types of content and user behaviors. Conduct user research to understand your users’ context to ensure your design decisions match their needs.

HATEOAS mentions adding pagination links specifically in its documentation. To create this, you’re going to create a resource called PaginatedReprisentation. After you make the first GET request, you’re going to search the results for the NEXT pagination in web application link and use that to return the next page of results. You can use many different approaches to create pagination in REST. Queries just happen to be the easiest to implement as well as consistent, so we’re going to stick with that approach.

Best Practices for Web API Pagination

So make sure to keep only valuable content across each of your pages while carrying out the process of pagination. Slack uses cursor-based pagination in their API to efficiently fetch large amounts of data. They use a unique identifier as the cursor, and provide this cursor in the API response to allow clients to fetch the next set of records. This allows them to handle large datasets with high performance and reliability. Cursor-based pagination can involve both forward and backward cursors. A forward cursor allows you to retrieve the next set of records, while a backward cursor allows you to navigate back to previous records.

By breaking down large datasets into manageable chunks, developers can ensure that clients retrieve and render data more efficiently. Offset-based pagination involves specifying the page number and the number of items per page. The API response includes a subset of the data starting from a specific offset. For example, you might request page 2 with 10 items per page, which would return items 11 to 20. When your site has large amounts of data, search engine bots need to use their crawl budget wisely.

Can cursor-based pagination be used with any type of data?

For instance, quick control buttons on websites such as the previous page, next page, first page, and so on, can contribute to pagination and save a lot of time for the users. This guides them in their journey, as they would know which pages to visit next. This is a defining trait of a refined and rewarding user interface for websites. Cursor-based pagination can be implemented in MySQL by using a unique identifier, such as a timestamp or a unique ID, as the cursor. You can then modify your SQL query to fetch records based on this cursor, using the ‘WHERE’ and ‘LIMIT’ clauses to specify the range of records to fetch. Offset pagination has its limitations, however, such as the limitations of large offset values and inaccuracies that come from page drift.

• Once users are on your site, then they have the opportunity to interact with other pages as structured by your pagination.
• This can make your integration development process all the more complicated and time consuming.
• How can API pagination help your APIs function at peak performance?
• You can read on to learn more about REST API pagination, including different pagination patterns and best practices to optimize your API’s functionality.
• With this typical setup, you can  see how many pages exist in total.
• There are cases where pagination can result in the creation of ‘thin’ content.

In this article, I will discuss different approaches and best practices to the pagination algorithms, and show what logic needs to be done for the actual link generation on the front end. For that, I will present a generic algorithm to implement page links on the result page. You have the option of scrolling to previous or subsequent URLs. If you use pagination to break down a single piece of content and present it on multiple pages, you must make an effort to notify search engines that the specific URL has a multi-page document.

Better luck next time!

This key is usually a unique and sequentially ordered column—for example, a timestamp or an auto-incrementing ID. Show empty view, display a progress when we are requesting more items, etc. You can find how to implement all that in the paging 3 codelab (I really encourage you to do it) or checkout the sample project mentioned at the beggining.

You are dealing with a large set of ordered data that is difficult to display on one page, but the user may need to view specific items from this set. When designing pagination from an accessibility standpoint, you must ensure that all users, irrespective of their abilities, can navigate and use your website effectively. This update shone a light upon the new pagination best practices for SEO. SEO professionals now have to consider each page under a paginated set as a unique page, and implement the best SEO practice across each one of them in order to rank them. So, how exactly does pagination influence the SEO of your website? Slideshare is a platform that aggregates across a huge number of categories, and the best way to offer the users a seamless experience is to segregate their content with pagination.

You will be doing your site a disservice as there are pages that will rank lower, pulling your entire site’s rank lower on search engine results. After getting data on how your site currently implements pagination, you are now ready to fix the identified issues. In order to ensure that your site correctly implements pagination, it is important to test how it is currently being implemented. While this has caused different reactions among SEOs, it has also emphasized the need to correctly implement pagination. When sites with high site authority link to your site, it is an indicator that your site is also high authority.

This process is implemented by websites on search engines, to yield organic results for each page on a website. Pagination is a technique for breaking large record sets into smaller portions called pages. As a developer, you should be familiar with implementing pagination, but implementing pagination for real time data can become tricky even for experienced developers. In this tutorial, we are going to discuss the practical use cases and solutions for real time data pagination and cursor based pagination.

What is the main difference between offset and cursor-based pagination?

Our weekly newsletter provides the best practices you need to build high performing product integrations. To help simplify your efforts and provide all the B2B integrations your product needs, you can just build to Merge’s Unified API. Pagination works like a skilled librarian who’s efficiently organizing and presenting books (in this case, data) so that you can easily find what you are looking for. And similar to how there are different ways to catalog books, there are different ways to segment, or paginate, data.