

Ask HN: Why do so many mobile websites/blogs paginate? - asto

Almost every mobile blogpost/article I read online these days is paginated into several pages. Agreed, on a mobile devices the number of bytes being transferred matters and the viewer shouldn't be forced to load the whole page to decide if he wants to read it but if I've already shown my intent to read more than the first page, then why isn't the remainder of the article - regardless of length - loaded into the second page? Having to load multiple pages on multiple articles via edge/3g on my phone's browser is such an annoyance! Does anybody know what the reason is behind the prevalence of this practice?
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mike-cardwell
Performance. Efficiency. I used to do it on my blog for these reasons, because
the page contained the first paragraph of each article. Now I only list my
blog post titles without the paragraph so I removed pagination. The page is
getting quite large though at 84 posts - <https://grepular.com/blog/>

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switz
I agree. I don't understand why they don't just use AJAX and load it as you
scroll. It's obviously a bit more complex and not baked in to wordpress and
the likes, but it should be standard in today's javascript world.

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makecheck
I can only assume it has something to do with increasing the number of unique
ads displayed. But I usually "reward" such sites by leaving and never coming
back, so I suspect it backfires.

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asto
That makes sense on a desktop page but on my cell phone browser, no ads are
displayed on most sites. Yet, they paginate. I don't get why!

