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Cofer257

: Should I depaginate my webpages? What is the best usability? My website is mostly a collection of things I've written, ranging from short to long; the very shortest are a large screenful and

@Cofer257

Posted in: #Page #Usability

My website is mostly a collection of things I've written, ranging from short to long; the very shortest are a large screenful and the very longest are the length of a short book. Most of the longer ones are broken into pages.

One Alertbox column said basically that pagination was very common practice, but it's better to have all of one logical page located on that one single page.

Basically I wanted to get a usability and other purposes suggestion on whether I should depaginate works so that they are one single page, and redirect the other pages to the combined page. If it's a judgment call, what are the pro's and con's?

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@Eichhorn148

You want to balance how long it takes to load the first page so that users can easily get started with the hassle of having users interrupt their reading to load the next page.

From my experience with SEO, you want your first page to load in under 3 seconds. Longer than that and users start clicking back out of your website and looking for another site (which causes your Google rankings to fall).

The HTTP archive tracks average web page size. The current average total page size (including images) is 1311 KB.

I downloaded a small book: Earnest Hemmingway's Old Man and the Sea. I saved it to a text file. It has 26,582 words. Uncompressed it is 133KB. Compressed with gzip (as you might have your website configured to serve it) it is 45KB.

Even a small book is going to negligible compared to size of most web pages (including images). Including the full text of a small book is about equivalent to adding a single new picture onto the page. If putting the full text of a small book on one page pushes your site over 3 seconds to load, it would be better to remove images from the page than to paginate.

For content the size of a small book, you should put it all in one page and not paginate.

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