Unlocking the Power of API Pagination: Best Practices and Strategies DEV Community

The goal is to leverage the strengths of each method to provide a more efficient and user-friendly experience. Database-driven pagination, without result set caching, will always take time equal to the time it takes to query for the entire set of data. It is irrelevant that only a portion of the data is returned to the consumer. For instance, if selection is complicated and involves sorting the data, returning rows 1 through 50 to the user will take the same time as returning rows 550 through 600. Depending on the structure of your pages with pagination, it is very likely that some pages may contain similar or identical content.

The timestamp can be dynamically determined using the last data item in the list. This seems to be more or less how Facebook paginates in its Graph API (scroll down to the bottom to see the pagination links in the format I gave above). Offset pagination is often used in B2B APIs because it’s straightforward to implement.

Best practices when implementing pagination

In this article, we’ll look at a simple way to divide content into a series of “pages” using HTML, CSS and vanilla JavaScript. Developer.com content and product recommendations are editorially independent. If you’re using GraphQL for your web API, pagination libraries are available that provide pagination capabilities for GraphQL queries.

API pagination is a key strategy for making sure your APIs run smoothly and effectively. The script we’ve created is handy for breaking up a table into a series of pages. Instead of table content, let’s try our script with some other kinds of content. Our script now calculates the appropriate range of items to display for each page, listens for button clicks, and updates the page display. Within each page iteration, a new individual page button is created using the document.createElement() method, increasing the page number by 1 each time it loops. On the Web, pagination is a way to break up large pieces of content into more bite-sized pieces.

Testing Your Site for Current Pagination Implementation

Load more and infinite scroll are generally implemented using JavaScript. When crawling a site to find pages to index, Google only follows page links marked up in HTML with tags. The Google crawler doesn’t follow buttons (unless marked up with ) and doesn’t trigger JavaScript to update the current page contents. There are a number of third-party solutions, both open source and commercial, that will provide APIs or tag libraries to implement paging and/or caching. One of the more popular is the Hibernate ORM solution for Java, which comes with support for most database flavors, and has internal caching.

Another one is OSCache, which provides different generic high-performance J2EE caching solutions. Many modern web frameworks also come with the pagination algorithm hooks, or ready-to-use modules. Now that we know some of the popular API pagination methods and libraries pagination in web application to help implement pagination, what are some best practices to remember? Here are some tips that should help you provide the best pagination experience for developer users. Laravel Paginator is a pagination library that comes with the Laravel framework.

Explore What Pagination Is and How to Implement It Properly

Now that we have learned about the common API pagination techniques, we are all ready to learn about the best practices to be followed while implementation of paginated APIs. The request retrieves the next set of products after the one with the key XYZ123. Keyset pagination relies on sorting and using a unique attribute or key in the dataset to determine the starting point for retrieving the next page.

This can help Googlebot (the Google web crawler) find subsequent pages. Provide sorting and filtering parameters to allow API consumers to specify the order and subset of data they require. This enhances flexibility and enables users to retrieve targeted results efficiently.

Balancing Usability and User Preferences

As a software engineer, I created this newsletter to share my first-hand knowledge of the development world. Each topic we will explore will provide valuable insights, with the goal of inspiring and helping all of you on your journey. I’ve thought long and hard about this and finally ended up with the solution I’ll describe below.

We have already mentioned a few reasons that necessitate the use of pagination, for example, when there is a large amount of data that can’t reasonably be presented as a single page. Each of the buttons represents a completely separate page that helps the user review their free YouTube course. They have a previous button “Optimize YouTube”, home button, and the next chapter “Channel Keyword”. It is important to note that even when the content on a section of a page is split into distinct pages, we will still define that as pagination. The challenge with pagination is striking the right balance between usability and catering to user preferences.

Basic Pagination Implementation on the Backend

But before we jump into the best practices, let’s go over what is API pagination and the standard pagination techniques used in the present day. When you have ‘shallow’ link depth, then link equity can be passed to paginated pages, giving them a chance to rank as standalone pages. This means that even if products may be in the same category, their individual description on each product page needs to be different.

• It can also get thrown off when items are removed from the database.
• Now, let’s look at an example where we use the parameters by which we can/want to give out unique content, and it’s important for us to keep such filtered pages in the index.
• It uses timestamps to segment and retrieve records; in other words, the client typically specifies a time range (start and end time) or a reference time point to retrieve records.
• Unlike keyset pagination, cursor-based pagination uses the cursor—a backend-determined value not necessarily linked to any data fields—to retrieve data from our API.
• Each of the buttons represents a completely separate page that helps the user review their free YouTube course.

Some popular libraries include graphql-relay (JavaScript), graphene-django (Python), and graphql-ruby (Ruby). These libraries offer standardized pagination features and integrate seamlessly with GraphQL schemas and resolvers. Django Rest Framework is a popular framework for building RESTful APIs in Python.

Working out the showPage() functionality

This may be something that is hard to do if you look at things from the perspective of the ‘old’ pagination techniques, which advised that only the pagination landing page needs to be indexed. Make sure that all links that you add to your pagination pages are crawlable. This major search engine is able to identify related pages, even when directives like noindex and the canonical tag are not used. After getting data on how your site currently implements pagination, you are now ready to fix the identified issues. In order to ensure that your site correctly implements pagination, it is important to test how it is currently being implemented. While this has caused different reactions among SEOs, it has also emphasized the need to correctly implement pagination.