Our take on Infinite Scroll

Published January 16, 2014

Infinite Scroll is a UX pattern in which a typical pagination is replaced by a script that monitors the current scroll position and loads the next page when a visitor reaches the end of the page. Many websites use infinite scroll including major ones like Twitter and Facebook.

Infinite Ajax Scroll has a unique take on Infinite Scroll. Lets explore some of its advantages.

Progressive enhancement

Infinite Ajax Scroll enhances the user experience of your website using JavaScript and AJAX. Visitors without JavaScript enabled will fallback on the regular server-side pagination. This also includes search engine crawlers, which means your website can be fully indexed.

Plug and play

When building the plugin we wanted it to be simple. While building a server-side pagination is easy, making a client-side infinite scroll can be hard. You have to account for many different browsers and use cases. With Infinite Ajax Scroll you can focus on the easy part: server-side pagination. Most platforms like Wordpress even come with these out of the box.

Extensions

Infinite scroll can have its weaknesses. For example the inability to permalink the current scrolled to page or unable to reach a footer, because while you scroll down, pages keep loading.

Infinite Ajax Scroll solves these issues with extensions. Take for example the History extension. When enabled the current url is automatically updated when the visitor scrolls through the pages. Now it's easy to copy the url from the address bar and share it with others and land right on the correct page.

The Trigger extension on the other hand lets you configure a "click here to load more" trigger when a visitor scroll through a specified number of pages. This is similar to how Google's infinite scroll works on Image Search.