Have you ever read an online article that was so long that it was split into several pages so you didn’t have to load one long page, and instead, you had several smaller pages, making it easier to digest? If you’re using WordPress as your blogging platform, this very same effect can be easily achieved!
This is a feature of WordPress that is not very well known, probably because blog posts are generally not meant to be as long as a New York Times article. Keep in mind that WordPress is not only used as a blogging platform, but it can also be used as a complete CMS for your website, so there may be times when you DO have articles that are long enough to require the use of pagination (pagination simply means “the numbering of the pages.”)
Other people may prefer to split up their one, long blog post into multiple posts instead. Whatever you choose to do, it’s entirely up to you; what I’m offering to you here is simply another option that you can use in the future.
In order to paginate your blog post, in the Write panel in your WordPress admin, switch to the Code view (if you are using the Visual view) and then enter the following code to wherever you want to break the post up into a new page. An example is also offered along with it:
...so John went to peruse.
<!--nextpage-->
The next day, he...
This will create a list of pages that make up that post, shown like this:
Page 1, 2, 3
And you’re all done!
I actually tried this feature recently for an article entitled: Technologies That The Smart Phone Is Making Extinct Right Now!, but wasn’t overjoyed with the results. What do you think?
