Pagination

Pagination is the row of controls that divides one long result set into numbered chunks: Previous, 1, 2, 3, ..., 18, Next. The page number tells you where you are, while the surrounding links let you move one page at a time or jump farther. It borrows the familiar mental model of numbered pages in a book or catalog, the same idea behind Google's old Goooooogle bar, where every extra o was one more page of results.

Reach for it when people need a stable position in a finite set, such as search results, orders, audit logs, or a large table. Numbered pages make it easy to return to page 6, share that URL, and understand roughly how much remains. For an open-ended feed, infinite scroll or a Load more button is usually a better fit. When the set is huge but nobody cares which page they are on, Gmail's version works too: Previous and Next arrows sitting next to a plain '1-50 of 2,341' count.

Gotcha: the control is navigation, not decoration. Use links when each page has its own URL, make the current page visually distinct and mark its link with aria-current='page', and preserve active filters and sorting in every destination. An ellipsis means skipped pages, so it should be plain text unless clicking it opens a real page picker. Previous and Next also need clear disabled states at the ends. Real anchors matter past accessibility too: Google said in 2019 that it had long since stopped using rel=prev and rel=next as indexing signals, so crawlable links are the only thing tying page 6 to page 5.