How to Add Pagination in WordPress Without Plugins – It’s Easy!!

WP-Paginate is a simple and flexible pagination plugin which provides users with better navigation on your WordPress site. In addition to increasing the user experience for your visitors, it has also been widely reported that pagination increases the SEO of your site by providing more links to your content.

It is one of the most popular WP plugins and very useful!! But did you know that since version 2.1, WordPress had a built-in function called paginate_links(), which can be used to create to paginate your blog without using any plugin? Today, let’s see how to add pagination in WordPress without plugins.

Simply paste the following code where you want to display your pagination:

global $wp_query;
$total = $wp_query->max_num_pages;
// only bother with the rest if we have more than 1 page!
if ( $total > 1 )  {
     // get the current page
     if ( !$current_page = get_query_var('paged') )
          $current_page = 1;
     // structure of "format" depends on whether we're using pretty permalinks
     $format = empty( get_option('permalink_structure') ) ? '&page=%#%' : 'page/%#%/';
     echo paginate_links(array(
          'base' => get_pagenum_link(1) . '%_%',
          'format' => $format,
          'current' => $current_page,
          'total' => $total,
          'mid_size' => 4,
          'type' => 'list'
     ));
}

Thanks to Smashing Magazine for the cool tip!