Infinite Scroll

Infinite Scroll is a web design technique in which new content is loaded automatically as the user scrolls down the page, eliminating the need for pagination. It is often used in social media feeds, product listings, or news websites. While infinite scroll provides a seamless browsing experience, it requires careful implementation to avoid performance issues and to ensure users can easily navigate or find specific content.

Infinite scroll increases engagement time by removing the natural pause point that pagination creates — but it also makes it impossible for users to remember where they were or share a specific position in a feed. For content discovery products (social media, news, marketplaces), infinite scroll maximizes consumption; for task-completion contexts (search results, admin tables), pagination is almost always better because users need to find specific items rather than browse endlessly.

Quartz's article feed loads new stories continuously as the user scrolls, with no pagination — a browsing-optimised pattern that keeps readers in discovery mode without interrupting the reading flow with page breaks.