For most online stores, the right answer is neither infinite scroll nor classic pagination — it’s a Load More button sitting on top of real paginated URLs. Infinite scroll strands keyboard and screen-reader users, makes your footer unreachable, and hides most of your catalog from Google, which doesn’t scroll. Plain pagination avoids all of that but measurably discourages browsing. The hybrid keeps the strengths of both, and it’s what usability research and accessibility specialists have converged on.
Most articles comparing the two only talk about conversion. This one covers the three costs that actually decide it for a store: who gets locked out, what Google never sees, and what your platform — especially Shopify — is doing under the hood.
Why is infinite scroll an accessibility problem?
Because it removes the one thing every navigation method depends on: an end. When products load forever, a sighted mouse user just keeps flicking the wheel. Everyone else hits a wall.
A keyboard user Tabs through your product grid link by link. With infinite scroll, more products keep injecting themselves ahead of the footer, so the links they need — contact, shipping policy, returns, your accessibility statement — stay permanently out of reach. There’s no page 2 to jump to and no way to skip ahead, a core failure we cover in our keyboard navigation guide.
Screen-reader users lose something subtler: the shape of the page. Raghavendra Satish Peri, the screen-reader user behind DigitalA11Y, wrote in his 2024 analysis of infinite scroll that on these pages “I was unable to figure out if there is footer or not.” He also tested ARIA’s role="feed" — the spec’s official answer — and concluded it “does not solve the accessibility challenges posed by the infinite scroll.”
This isn’t a new or fringe position. The accessibility blog Web Axe reached the same verdict back in 2015, quoting accessibility consultant Derek Featherstone’s advice in full: “Just don’t implement infinite scrolling.”
The footer problem is worse than it sounds
For a store, the footer isn’t decoration — it’s where shoppers look for shipping costs, return policies, contact info, and trust signals before they commit. Infinite scroll can put all of it behind a treadmill.
Nielsen Norman Group’s guidance on infinite scrolling, updated by Tim Neusesser in 2022, is blunt: “Infinite scrolling (without a Load More button) can make it impossible to access the footer,” because every attempt to reach it loads another batch of products that shoves it back down. NN/g also flags the exact task online shoppers do constantly — comparing items that sit far apart in a list — as one infinite scroll handles badly, since an endless list has no landmarks to return to.
And there’s the back-button trap every shopper has felt: tap a product, hit back, and the grid dumps you at the top of an unloaded list. In Baymard Institute’s large-scale usability testing of ecommerce product lists, published at Smashing Magazine in 2016, more than 90% of sites with dynamically loaded product lists failed to restore the user’s position on return — a lost-position bug that hits everyone, but hits assistive-technology users hardest because rebuilding context costs them far more effort.
Which WCAG criteria does infinite scroll trip?
No success criterion bans infinite scroll by name, but in an audit the common implementations run into at least three, all part of WCAG 2.1 AA:
- 2.1.1 Keyboard — all functionality must be operable by keyboard. Grids that only fetch the next batch on mouse-wheel or touch scroll events leave keyboard users with no way to load — or reach — the rest of the catalog.
- 2.2.2 Pause, Stop, Hide — auto-updating content needs a way to pause or stop it. A page that appends products on its own, with no control, is auto-updating content with no off switch.
- 4.1.3 Status Messages — when 24 new products silently attach to the page, a screen-reader user gets no announcement that anything happened, or that loading is in progress.
None of this is theoretical for a store owner. According to UsableNet’s year-end 2025 lawsuit data, ecommerce accounted for nearly 70% of all digital accessibility lawsuits filed in 2025 — the most-sued sector by a wide margin. Product browsing and checkout are what testers check first, the same pattern we see across ecommerce accessibility work generally and in screen-reader checkout testing specifically.
The SEO cost: Google doesn’t scroll
Googlebot behaves like the most impatient visitor you have. Google’s own ecommerce documentation on pagination and incremental page loading states that “Google’s crawlers don’t ‘click’ buttons and generally don’t trigger JavaScript functions that require user actions to update the current page contents.”
Read that against your product grid. If products 25 through 500 only exist after a scroll event fires, Google never sees them from that page. For a store, that can mean most of the catalog has no crawl path from its own collection pages.
Google’s fix is structural, not cosmetic: give each batch of results its own URL — a ?page=n parameter is fine — and give each of those pages its own canonical rather than pointing them all at page 1. That guidance holds whether the front end shows page links, a Load More button, or automatic loading. The pattern that satisfies it is progressive enhancement: paginated URLs in the markup, JavaScript layered on top.
Infinite scroll vs. pagination vs. Load More: the honest comparison
Here’s how the three patterns stack up on the criteria that matter to a store — including the one row most comparisons skip.
| Infinite scroll | Classic pagination | Load More + paginated URLs | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Keyboard users can reach everything, incl. footer | No — footer keeps escaping | Yes | Yes — loading stops until asked |
| Screen-reader users get page structure and an endpoint | No | Yes | Yes, with focus management |
| Google can crawl the full catalog | Only with hidden paginated URLs | Yes | Yes — real URLs underneath |
| Shoppers keep browsing deep into the list | Yes, but scanning is shallow | No — page links discourage it | Yes — Baymard’s top performer |
| Back button returns you to your spot | Usually broken | Yes | Yes, with history.pushState() |
| Verdict | Avoid for product grids | Acceptable, safe default | Best of both — recommended |
The middle column deserves a fair reading: pagination’s weakness is engagement, not access. In Baymard’s testing, users “perceived pagination to be slow,” and rows of page links discouraged them from exploring the product list. That’s a real revenue argument against it — it’s just not an argument for infinite scroll, because the same testing found Load More with lazy-loaded images was the strongest pattern overall for ecommerce product lists (Baymard Institute, via Smashing Magazine, 2016).
What about Shopify collection pages?
Shopify’s defaults are on your side here — until an app changes them. Collection pages in Shopify themes, including Dawn, paginate with crawlable ?page=N URLs, and the platform’s paginate tag caps any page at 250 products, so a compliant, indexable structure exists out of the box.
Infinite scroll on Shopify is nearly always an add-on: an app or a copy-pasted script (Ajaxinate is the common one) that intercepts the pagination and swaps it for scroll-triggered loading. Done carelessly, that edit removes the crawl path Google was using and introduces every accessibility problem above in one deploy — on top of the theme- and app-related issues we catalog in Shopify’s common accessibility pitfalls and our Shopify ADA compliance guide.
If you keep one rule, keep this: the paginated links must stay in the rendered markup, even if JavaScript hides them and loads products dynamically for sighted mouse users. That single decision preserves both the crawl path and the non-JavaScript fallback.
How to build a Load More button that actually works
A Load More button is only the accessible choice if it’s built like one. The BBC’s GEL technical guide for Load More is the reference implementation for the button, focus, and announcement behavior; add the URL handling that Google’s crawl guidance and Baymard’s back-button findings demand, and it comes down to five requirements:
- Use a real
buttonelement — not a styleddiv— so it’s focusable and operable by keyboard and switch devices. - Move focus to the new content. After loading, send focus to a separator introducing the batch (the BBC uses “Results 6 to 12”) or to the first new item, so keyboard users continue from where the list grew instead of being dumped back at the button.
- Announce the loading state. A polite live region that says “Loading, please wait” and then confirms the new items satisfies 4.1.3 Status Messages instead of leaving screen-reader users in silence.
- Update the URL as batches load with
history.pushState(), so the back button restores position — the failure Baymard found on over 90% of sites tested. - Keep numbered pagination as the no-JavaScript fallback, which is also what keeps every product crawlable at its own URL.
Hand this list to whoever builds your theme. It’s a day or two of front-end work, not a replatform.
The bottom line for your store
Infinite scroll optimizes for one visitor: sighted, mouse-wielding, idly browsing. Your store also has to serve the shopper on a keyboard, the screen-reader user trying to find your return policy, and a crawler that will never scroll — and it has to do it in a legal climate where ecommerce sites draw more accessibility lawsuits than any other category. A Load More button over real paginated URLs serves all of them at once, and the best available ecommerce testing says it sells more than pagination anyway.
If your product grid uses infinite scroll today — especially via a Shopify app you installed years ago — it’s worth finding out what it’s costing you before a tester or a demand letter does. Run a free accessibility scan and see how your collection pages hold up.