Magento 2 pagination is a necessary element for better store navigation that also improves loading speed and SEO, especially for large catalogues. Pagination splits products across multiple pages instead of loading everything at once. This improves navigation for both visitors and Google crawlers.
This guide covers all pagination settings in Magento, Magento SEO tips for pagination, and teaches how to choose the best pagination style for your store.
- Displaying 20-40 products per page is a recommended Magento pagination setting for large catalogues to keep the balance between speed and user experience.
- Magento provides built-in pagination controls, such as View As, Sort By, Show Per Page, and Pagination Links.
- Pagination creates unique URLs for product listing pages and enables search engines to discover and index more products.
- Magento AJAX pagination or AJAX infinite scroll is a pagination alternative that loads products dynamically while keeping users on the same page.
- Magento lacks pagination SEO settings recommended for better crawling and indexing. To optimise pagination for SEO, a dedicated Magefan Magento 2 SEO extension is recommended.
What Is Magento 2 Pagination?
Magento 2 pagination is a process of dividing a large product listing in Magento into several smaller numbered pages to improve navigation, speed and SEO of a website. According to default Magento settings, pages are divided based on a set of pagination controls and limits.
e.g., if a category page contains 1,000 products and Magento tries to load them at once, the page becomes very heavy. Instead, Magento allows merchants to display only a configured number of products on each page for fast loading.
What Are Pagination Controls in Magento 2?
Pagination controls are frontend navigation elements that help customers divide large product catalogs into smaller, manageable pages and choose how products should appear on the screen. This gives customers more control and flexibility when looking for products.
There are 4 types of Magento pagination controls:
| Pagination control | Description | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| View As | Displays products either in the form of a list or a grid | Fashion stores and electronics stores with visually rich catalogs, or B2B catalogs, where users may prefer detailed list views |
| Sort By | Changes the sort order of the products | Product discovery where customers quickly find relevant or popular items using the sorting option, such as "bestseller", "newest", etc |
| Pagination Links | Helps to navigate between pages | Preventing performance issues caused by loading too many products at once |
| Show Per Page | Defines the number of products displayed on the page | User experience and page performance, especially for large image-heavy catalogs |
If customers visit a category page with 48 tops, pagination controls allow them to view products in a grid, sort the tops by price, move to "page 3" right away, or see 6 items per page instead of 48.
What Are Magento 2 Pagination Set Limits?
Magento 2 pagination set limit is a configurable constraint for the number of products the system loads and displays on a category page. These limits are always divided into the per-page limits (grid and list views) and pagination frame limits.
However, very often merchants have doubts about which value to choose in configurations.
e.g. showing 10 items per page seems good for the store speed, but makes customers switch through more pages. At the same time, 100 products on a single page may overwhelm customers and make the page too heavy. Especially on mobiles.
Therefore, it's important to understand how to choose the right value that can balance both store performance and user experience.
The following table explains how to choose a Magento 2 pagination limit based on the most commonly recommended values.
| Product per page | Recommended for | Benefit |
|---|---|---|
| 10-20 | Small stores, fashion boutiques, luxury brands, and mobile-focused stores with high-resolution images | Fast loading speed and clean browsing experience. However, creates more paginated URLs, which can make it harder for search engines to crawl and understand the store structure |
| 20-40 | Most medium-sized Magento stores with medium-sized catalogs | Balanced option that offers both comfortable browsing and good performance |
| 40-60 | Large B2B stores or wholesale catalogs | Allows customers to view more products at once without the need to switch between pages frequently |
| 60 + | Rarely recommended | Can slow down page speed, affect Core Web Vitals, and provide a poor mobile user experience |
Pagination limit between 20-40 products per page is considered to be the safest and most balanced option for most Magento stores.
However, before choosing your pagination limits, test the settings and monitor how each limit type affects your store (that is, page speed, bounce rate, Core Web Vitals, average session duration, and conversion rates).
How to Configure Magento 2 Pagination?
Configuring pagination in Magento 2 involves setting the pagination frame, frame skip, and switcher anchors in the corresponding store view design settings.
So let's go through these settings step by step.
1. Go to Content > Design > Configuration and find the theme you want to Edit.
2. Start editing a theme, and scroll to the Pagination section.
3. Enter the number of links to be displayed in the Pagination Frame field (number of page links 1, 2, 3, 4 at the bottom of the navigation page).
e.g. if you set the value to 4, visitors will see up to five page numbers in the pagination bar, before the system shows the next set of links.
4. Determine how many links should be skipped for the system to start displaying the next set of links in the Pagination Frame Skip field.
Note: the recommended value is 2 for most stores and 3-5 for stores with large catalogs when visitors need to move through pages faster.
5. Fill out the Anchor Text for Previous and Next buttons, or leave the field empty to apply the default arrow.
Don't forget to Save Config and check how pagination works on the frontend.
Magento 2 Pagination SEO Best Practices
Magento doesn't have any SEO settings for pagination by default. To add more advanced SEO options like rel prev/next links, ?p=, or set metadata for pagination pages, you need Magefan .
Check the following SEO best practices for Magento pagination and examples of the Magefan setting for pagination SEO:
Use self-referencing canonical tags
It's recommended to use self-referencing canonical tags on paginated product pages rather than point all paginated pages back to the category page (page 1). This tells search engines to treat each page as a unique URL.
e.g., the canonical tag on Page 2 of the men's shoes category should point to https://yourwebsite.com/men/shoes?p=2, not to the first page https://yourwebsite.com/men/shoes.
Keep pagination links easy to crawl
Some of your products may never be found if your paginated buttons are hidden behind JavaScript or blocked from crawling. Make sure your pagination links, like Next, Previous, and page numbers, use HTML whenever possible.
Use rel="next" and rel="prev"
The rel="next" and rel="prev" tags indicate the order of paginated pages and show that they belong to the same series. Use Magefan SEO Extension to automatically.
Rel pre/next for pagination pages enabled in Magefan SEO extension
For example, if a category has three pages (/category (Page 1), /category?p=2 (Page 2), and /category?p=3 (Page 3)), the HTML code on Page 2 would contain the following:
<link rel="prev" href="https://example.com/category?p=1">
<link rel="next" href="https://example.com/category?p=3">
This tells crawlers that page 1 comes before the current page, and page 3 comes after it.
Optimise metadata for each pagination page
Even though the page with have self-referrencing ?p= tag, metadata still stays the same for all pages, which sends duplicate content signals to search crawlers.
Adding a page number to the page title and data makes it unique and prevents any misleading signals to Google. Magefan SEO enables you to add a page number to all pages automatically.
Example of the pagination pages metadata settings
Block pagination pages from indexing
If you have an extremely large catalogue with multiple pages, indexing all of them, even if you follow all of the best practices we've mentioned, might be excessive.
In this case, you can automatically set custom noindex robots for all pagination pages using Magefan SEO Rules.
Enable of the SEO rule for setting noindex follow tags in bulk for all pagination pages
Manage filtered URLs
Category pages also contain layered navigation in Magento. It allows visitors to filter products by price color, size, brand, and any other attribute, which generates multiple pages too.
But as soon as people use filtered navigation, even if they're on Page 2, the filter parameter is added to the URL instead of the ?p=. So once you optimize pagination SEO in Magento, configure layered navigation options.
e.g. https://yourwebsite.com/men/shoes?color=black
Keep a clear site structure
A simple category structure combined with pagination helps find products quickly, not only for visitors, but for search engines.
If products are hidden behind many layers of navigation, it may take longer for search engines to discover and index them.
Magento Pagination vs Magento AJAX Pagination
While pagination is the process of dividing a large category page into multiple smaller pages, Magento 2 AJAX pagination or AJAX infinite scroll loads those pages dynamically. It allows customers to scroll down the products without reloading the entire page.
A lot of merchants prefer infinite scroll rather than the default Magento pagination. But only if implemented properly for both page performance and SEO.
So, before you decide which approach to go for, the default Magento pagination or the AJAX infinite scroll, consider their advantages and disadvantages.
If your store has hundreds of products spread across many category pages and you value organic search traffic, default pagination becomes a better option.
If your goal is to keep visitors more engaged and provide a better browsing experience for mobile users, infinite scroll is an effective solution.
Choose one of the other and follow the best SEO practices for pagination pages to keep browsing your catalog seamless for both people and bots.
FAQs
Should paginated pages be indexed in Magento 2?
Can I fix duplicate content caused by pagination in Magento 2 automatically?
What is the default products per page in Magento 2?
How do I add pagination to a custom module in Magento?
- 1. Create a collection of items.
- 2. Create a Magento\Theme\Block\Html\Pager block.
- 3. Attach the collection to the pager using setCollection().
- 4. Render the pager in the template using getPagerHtml().
Once connected, Magento automatically handles page numbers, current page detection (?p=2), limits, and navigation links.
How do I remove the ?p=1 parameter from Magento pagination URLs?
