What is Infinite Scrolling?

Website design trends change as technology advances. That’s why website’s don’t look like they do back in the early 2000’s. Currently, there are a few different trends emerging, such as typography and videos. Another latest trend is using infinite scroll. What that means is that there are no pages to flip through, and you can scroll through a website forever. Infinite scrolling has been around for a while. Social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr use this.  

Infinite Scrolling Strengths

One major strength of infinite scroll is that it’s great for mobile devices. Flipping through pages on the tiny screen of your phone is more difficult that scrolling with your thumb. Because of this, we have gotten used to scrolling indefinitely, which is why it is being used by websites. Another good thing about infinite scroll is that you don’t have to wait for pages to load. Website’s content is loaded to your screen already. Twitter uses infinite scrolling effectively. Since users see all tweets in real time, users just scroll until they have finished looking at all the new tweets on their feed.

Infinite Scrolling Weaknesses

Sometimes when implementing infinite scroll, users just keep scrolling. For social media websites, this is effective. But if Google tried infinite scrolling, it probably wouldn’t work out so well. That’s because Google works by ranking certain websites in a general order of best to worst. Most users don’t even click on the second page of Google results. But if Google had infinite scroll? Users would probably waste more time on the site. Coming to the end of a page gives users a “sense of control”.

So while infinite scroll is trendy, not all sites should be using it. It is best to carefully think about whether or not you’d like to use infinite scroll. However, if your site can go mobile, you should definitely use it for mobile view.