Poor UX is making the open web terrible at the worst possible time.

What am I talking about? This little guy, which appears on 55% of websites, is metering out content, a few screenfuls at a time.

10 examples of load more buttons

How do I know it's 55%?

Last night. I did an extremely non-scientific study. I visited a "top 100" list of websites, and eyeballed each one, to see how they'd implemented navigation. Specifically, I was looking at how the website handled the concept of "more on this topic". So for example, I might look at the "sports" section of a news website, and then ask: "how do I see the rest of the sports stories"?

Sites implement this in 3 main ways. Well, "implement" in air quotes..

Type Num Sites
N/A 19%
Pagination 26%
Load More 55%

That "N/A" means exactly what you think. 19% of sites just didn't have any obvious way to reach additional content. I couldn't believe it. There'd be a "sports section" that had 20 recent articles, and then.. nothing else. No pagination, no "more" button, no link to an archive with the other 1,000+ articles. If they even had a search or sitemap, it was always elsewhere, a tiny icon in the header or footer. Very strange. Not what I'd come to investigate, but maybe something to look into later.

Next at 26%, we have pagination. This is my preferred navigation pattern. Crucially, it lets you jump more than one page at a time. Of course, there are better/worse ways of doing this. But either way, my argument is that pagination is always preferable for typical websites.

Finally we have the "load more" button. On 55% of sites surveyed, this button was the primary form of navigation at the end of an article or section. I'm including "infinite scroll" and "previous/next buttons" here too. Infinite scroll is just "load more" without the button. "Previous/next" is a bi-directional variant. Clearly the technique is popular. But popular or not, as a user, I find "load more" pretty darn annoying.

What's the problem?

"Load More" is a bad navigation pattern.

It's bad for users and website operators alike.

For users, it takes away control. It eliminates user choice and ignores one of the web's greatest strengths: the ability to navigate freely! Magazine readers can flip pages, YouTube viewers can jump past boring parts of a video. Why force website users to march in a straight line?

For websites operators, it's worse. "Load more" devalues old content by making it unfindable. No user is going to scroll and click through twenty pages of junk to resurface an article they read last year. At best they won't bother, and at worst they will become frustrated, give up, and never return. It forces users to rely on Google rather than a site's own navigation, leaching away pageviews and revenue.

Maybe "load more" is fine? Perhaps the problem is that the REST of the navigation is bad?

Sorta! I think it's both.

Most websites have crappy internal search pages. Very often, those internal search pages use the same "load more" behavior too. User-friendly sitemaps and archives? Many sites lack these entirely. If they do exist, often it's for SEO and they're optimized for machines, not humans. Don't worry. I'll come back and complain about this more in detail soon. It's a topic for future research.

Google Search is no solution. Website operators may think: "Hey, why bother? Google is gonna do it better anyway, right?" Well, not necessarily. Good internal search is possible. It's just difficult. But ceding search entirely to Google is a disaster. If users cannot easily find content, because the "load more" buttons force linear navigation and the site search sucks, users will most definitely turn elsewhere. The problem is that Google won't bring those users back! Instead they will get AI overviews or visit a competitor.

The thing that so many website operators don't understand is these "lost users" are INVISIBLE. They don't appear in the metrics. They're the uncountable masses who never reached the site in the first place, because their needs were met elsewhere.

What should we do instead?

In almost every case, I think that "load more" buttons should be replaced with pagination, and supplemented with a link to an archive page. Something like this?

Two examples of pagination

Gizmodo and PCMag do it fine, in my opinion.

Why is pagination better? It puts users in control. It allows free navigation. Showing the total number of pages even hints at the overall size of the topic/category. It's less annoying.

Better navigation = happier users = more users.

That's it. No fancy more complicated reason.

Not everyone agrees

A lot of effort has gone into justifying "load more" being superior to pagination. It's favored 2:1 in the websites I checked. As far as I can tell, there are 5 main arguments:

  1. Fits modern scrolling behavior
  2. Improved website metrics
  3. Better perceived performance
  4. Better narrative flow
  5. Prettier UI

Let's look closer and see if these are valid.

Fits modern scrolling behavior

What exactly is "modern scrolling behavior"? I take that to mean "social feeds" on mobile. So really, it's follow the leader. If a super-popular website does something, then it must be pretty smart. Right?

Well, maybe and maybe not.

Social feeds are optimized for short-form content. A user reading a 1500 word essay is engaging in a very different behavior than a user scrolling through memes at 2AM. No judgement by the way! I like memes! Just saying it's different. What's works for one type of content isn't necessarily best for another.

Another interpretation of "modern scrolling behavior" is that "load more" has become the de-facto standard. It's a circular argument. This is how things are done, so users have learned to expect it. Since users expect it, then that's how things SHOULD be done? Right? No, I think that argument has to be rejected. It's a shame that users expect crappy behavior, but that's no reason to perpetuate it.

Improves Website Metrics

This reason is popular with website operators. The concept makes sense. Upon reaching the end of an article, the user makes a decision: continue or leave? Having a big "load more" button supposedly eases cognitive load. Instead of "this or that", the decision is now just "yes or no".

Improved "user engagement" then leads to more pageviews, higher dwell time, and longer session length. All good news to website operators.

Often, the numbers do go up, at least temporarily, but sometimes they hide an ugly truth. Pageviews, dwell time and session length can increase for a different reason: the site has become harder to navigate.

Looking for a story from last week?

Too bad. Now you are forced to scroll through 3 extra pages of crud to reach it.

But hey, that's 3 extra pageviews..

Call it "user engagement" or call it a "dark pattern" to juice the metrics.

That's okay though. The metrics are probably wrong anyway.

In my personal experience working with hundreds of websites, I happen to know that very few of them count pageviews correctly, especially on infinite scroll pages. Many count either too many or too few. Sounds crazy, but it's true. If you're curious, you can watch the pixels fire in the network traffic.

Better perceived performance

This argument states that "load more" feels "faster" because it dynamically loads content inline without a full page refresh.

Great. Pagination can do that too. Problem solved.

The bigger issue is this argument assumes the user wants to consume 100% of the site content in linear order in the first place. It claims to be "fast" while ignoring all the time users spend wading through garbage because they aren't allowed to skip ahead.

Better narrative flow

I hesitate to include this, but I've seen it cited as a justification for linear navigation. The idea appears to be that "load more" preserves continuity and makes the entire website feel like a single experience. It keeps the website owner in control.

I think that's fine in VERY narrow circumstance. For 0.1% of websites, sure. Perhaps the website needs to tightly control the user experience to portray some specific artistic vision. This is exceedingly rare.

For the vast majority of content sites, the user should be in control. The website operator cares about retention, not artistic vision. They should hopefully prefer user friendly navigation as well.

Prettier UI

Finally there's the idea that mobile screens are too small to accomodate anything except a big "load more" button. There simply isn't enough space for anything better.

There are two problems here. First, that's just wrong. Maybe it was true in the early days of mobile, but now screens are sharper, denser and more sensitive. There is plenty of space for creative and well-designed navigation.

Second, even if we DID accept the argument that mobile screens are too small, that doesn't excuse the prevalence of "load more" on tablet or desktop devices, which have plenty of space for more advanced navigation.

How did we get here?

Hopefully I've convinced you that at least SOME of the current justifications are dubious. But in fact, I think historically, it was some fairly different trends that led to these buttons appearing in the first place.

Mimicking social UX

Social completely took over the internet in the 2010s, and websites were eager to copy anything they could, including the navigation. I said this up top. But it was and continues to be a big factor.

Responsive design

Starting in 2010, this movement encouraged adaptive layouts that worked on any screen from small to huge. Terms like "mobile-first" and "progressive enhancement" became popular, suggesting that developers optimize for mobile, and then scale up to larger screens, while adding in additional features. In practice, many sites did strip down for mobile, but then forgot to use the extra real estate on desktop.

Single Page Apps

Frameworks like React, Vue and Angular led many websites to be completely redesigned as Single Page Apps. The SPA mindset heavily favors dynamic content and explicit;y shuns full-page reloads. Implementing "load more" felt easy and natural in these frameworks.

Tutorials

Along with the new frameworks came the tutorials. Everybody needed to learn how to use them. It turns out that "load more" was a perfect topic for tutorials. It was easy and relevant, so a lot of them got written. There are pagination tutorials too, but they are fewer because it's more complicated.

So What?

I wish that sites had better navigation. I don't expect that 26% to go up however. "Load more" is probably here to stay. If we're lucky, we'll get better site search and archive pages.

In my view, chasing certain trends has led to the irrelevance, if not yet the demise, of large parts of the open web. There are MANY MANY other factors, but they've partly done themselves in with worse and worse UX.

Now...

Does this even matter in 2026?

Honestly, no.

Pretty soon, maybe even today, an agent will be fetching most web content on your behalf. It won't particularly care about intra-site navigation concerns because it will have a machine-optimized sitemap or its own crawl data anyway. I'm not complaining, by the way. This will be an improvement. But it's a funny thing to consider after decades in web development!

Footnotes

Regarding the "top 100" list of sites. I used the "Moz Top 500 Sites" list, and deleted everything that wasn't primarily a "content site" and then winnowed that down even further to reach 100. The remaining sites were ones that I'd heard of or visited before, so like "well known" stuff. I eliminated e-commerce because those are not "content sites" primarily. I wasn't thrilled with the list, but I was only prepared to do a certain amount of work for a blog post. The list was still representative and good enough for the idea I wanted to investigate here.