Yesterday we wrote an article on the site showing you how to increase pageviews and reduce bounce rate in WordPress. One of the tips we mentioned was splitting long posts into multiple pages. You can see an example of how we split our posts into two pages or even into five pages. After writing that article, we got a lot of inquiries from people asking us multiple questions. How do you split the posts into multiple pages? I put the <!––nextpage––> tag, but no pagination shows up. Well worry not. In this article, we will show you how to split WordPress posts into multiple pages.
On most well-coded themes, all you have to do is paste this code: <!––nextpage––> wherever you want the next page to start. The pagination will automatically show up. But that might not be the case if your theme is not coded properly.
If for some reason, pagination is not showing up after you have pasted the next page tags, then you would need to add the following code in your single.php loop.
<?php wp_link_pages(); ?>
Once you add that, then the pagination will start to show. There are several parameters for this function that you can use. The codex page for Styling Page-Links does a good job explaining that.
I thought, it wasn’t working on mine, lately I read it somewhere else, I need to put the given tag into html view, and finally it worked. Please mention in your article as well, as I know many noobs like me are out there
Tried it but my links for the other pages shows up at the way bottom left of my website rather than appearing even before the comments. Any ideas why that would be? Website is ReignMediaLA.com and the theme is Press Grid.
Sounds like an issue with your theme’s styling.
Never mind..
Of course it worked AFTER I’d tried for half an hour and finally decided to complaint.
I’ve tried to use the code but all I get is the code text in my post :/ I’ve only used the HTML window to place the code and yet – there it is – on my post as text, not as next page.
What can I do?
Hi guys,
Don’t ask me how, but I manage to do this in my site and it works like a charm!
BUT I don’t know how to give the numbers a style. I’m looking for something like you did in here, big numbers with a huge box of color. Can you help me with this? May be if you give me the line of code you used.
Sorry if I sound silly, but I don’t really know code.
Please!
There is no code involved. You have to know CSS formatting.
Great! And so easy! Thank you!
It wont work even if you follow these instructions, the correct code is ‘ not as you said (you had only single dashes) – also you should tell people that it needs to be entered in html view on visual.
Ah darn the auto-formatting. It was showing correctly in the backend, but then on the front-end it turned our two dashes into one big dash. Fixed that. Thanks for pointing it out.
Darnit, tried to get this to work on my site but failed
Was hoping as it was a premium theme it would work out of the box but sadly not.
As an SEO I can say there should be no problem with this SEO-wise. If anything having an extra couple of pages won’t hurt.
Hi,
I tried what you’ve said, but ot still doesnt work on my theme. i’m using goodnews theme from themeforest
Hey Raja,
This is a standard WordPress feature. If it doesn’t work with your theme, then you should contact the theme author and ask them to add the support for it.
You know Stephen, I would have agreed with you on almost all of those cases a few months ago. I still do agree with you that this works only in very specific cases. However, after seeing the numbers on our new site, my perspective has changed a little bit. First of all, if your article is good enough, then the user will go to the next page. In terms of SEO, definitely not true. If you have sufficient amount of content on each page, then it will not hurt you in SEO for a single bit. Forbes, NYTimes, and countless other big name sites do this and rank perfectly fine for SEO. If your content is good, then it will be shared, it will be linked, and it will be read by your users.
@wpbeginner I agree, I am planning to write a three part article (which is going to be somewhere in the area of 5000+ words) and I really don’t want to fit it all into one page. I am contemplating whether to stick with pagination or split it into multiple articles — but I will have to do a little bit more keyword research before I decide. If the ideas I intend to discuss are in a wide variety of keywords, than I’ll probably split it, otherwise this pagination method will work out quite nicely! Thanks for the share.
Thanks God for give us WPBeginner!
Thanks for telling us how to do this, but I hope not too many people actually implement it and split their posts.
That’s a relic of the days when people artificially increased their page views to increase advertising revenue, but thankfully most people these days recognise that it leads to a poor user experience. I personally leave sites as soon as I see paged articles (unless I really *have* to read it).
There’s also the SEO implications – you’re probably going to rank better with one long article than you would with 5 smaller pages.
And I could go on, but I’ll stop there. It’s not a good idea in 99.9% of cases.