Infinite Scroll

Problem

Traditional pagination forces users to click “Next” repeatedly, breaking flow and adding unnecessary interactions. Loading all content upfront overwhelms the browser with thousands of items. Users lose their scroll position when navigating back from detail pages. Feed-style interfaces feel clunky with manual page controls.

Solution

Load additional content automatically as users scroll toward the bottom rather than requiring explicit pagination. This creates seamless browsing for content streams but can make it hard to reach footers.

Example

This example demonstrates detecting when a user scrolls near the bottom and automatically loading more content to create a seamless infinite scroll experience.

// Web Component that loads more content as user scrolls
class InfiniteScroll extends HTMLElement {
  connectedCallback() {
    // Define scroll handler to detect when user nears bottom
    this.handleScroll = () => {
      const { scrollTop, scrollHeight, clientHeight } = this;
      // Trigger load when within 500px of bottom
      if (scrollTop + clientHeight >= scrollHeight - 500) {
        this.loadMore();
      }
    };

    // Attach scroll listener
    this.addEventListener('scroll', this.handleScroll);
  }

  disconnectedCallback() {
    // Clean up listener to prevent memory leaks
    this.removeEventListener('scroll', this.handleScroll);
  }

  async loadMore() {
    // Fetch next batch of items
    const items = await fetchMoreItems();
    // Add new items to existing content
    this.appendItems(items);
  }
}

Benefits

• Creates seamless browsing experience without interrupting user flow with pagination clicks.
• Reduces friction for feed-style interfaces like social media or news sites.
• Improves engagement by making content discovery feel effortless.
• Preserves scroll position naturally when navigating back and forth.

Tradeoffs

• Makes footer content difficult or impossible to reach as new content keeps loading.
• Can hurt performance by keeping thousands of DOM elements in memory.
• Complicates accessibility as screen readers struggle with dynamically added content.
• Harder to share specific positions since URLs don’t map to content offsets.