How to enable pagination in WordPress
In the world of blogging, this is the age and time of super long articles. To rank well on Google long articles seem to be the norm. But, at the same time, you also need to think of your readers as well. WIth long form content, the sheer plethora of having so many words on your post can turn off users. If it seems like a lot of work, people are not going to really be ready to do the work.
We need to publish long-form while also making sure that it remains accessible to the end user too.
There’s a good technique that can help us make our blogs more readable and accessible to the end user. Use pagination.
Post pagination breaks down your single post into several different chapters consisting of different pages.
With this, you reduce page size, you reduce the number of images and graphics that are supposed to load with the post. You reduce javascript calls and so on. Post pagination is ideal to reduce server load times a little.
Ideally who can use post pagination?
If your blog posts are short and to the point, say around 1000 words in length you don’t want to try pagination. If not, you might want to try pagination. Blogposts that frequently run up to 5000 words or longer are best split into two or three different blbog posts.
To split a single post into several pages add this shortcode before the paragraph where you want to start a new page.
This is the shortcode to add: <!––nextpage––>
Open up the post in the txt editor mode and add the code in the right place and where you added the code there will be a new page.
Pagination of posts with the shortcode helps you take yourselves to the next page. If this doesnn’t work here’s another technique to apply. Add the code below to the single.php file in your themes file on WordPress.
to appearance menu on the left hand side and click on editor. From the files locate single.php.
At the end of the code lines paste the following
<?php wp_link_pages(); ?>
Single.php is the core of single posts be it blog posts or pages.
You can also use plugins like advanced pagination for posts, But I’d say it’s less than likely that you will require the use of plguins for this.