Infinite scroll has become almost synonymous with modern web design. It might feel sleek, immersive, and frictionless — no ‘next page’ button to click, just a smooth river of content that never seems to end.
But here’s the reality — Infinite scroll is often a trap. While it looks modern, it can seriously hurt accessibility, performance, and user experience. In this post, we’ll unpack the infinite scroll trap, show you why it’s problematic!
How infinite scroll works
At its core, infinite scroll is a design approach which loads content continuously as the user scrolls down. Also called endless scroll, the point is that the user never reaches the end of the page. Instead, they’re presented with a perpetual content stream without having to click.
Why infinite scroll seems modern
- Frictionless browsing: Arguably, the biggest advantage of infinite scrolling is that it reduces interruptions and that the users don’t have to click ‘next’ button.
- Keeps users engaged: Endless feeds often feel immersive.
Why is it problematic?
Accessibility nightmares
- Screen readers: Continuous content updates can disorient users. Some screen reader users might think the page is very long and might miss the footer region completely, especially if it is pushed out of reach.
- Focus issues: Newly injected content can grab focus unexpectedly or leave the user lost.
- Cognitive overload: Users with ADHD, dyslexia may struggle with never -ending streams of content.
- Keyboard traps: Infinite scroll can make it impossible for keyboard users to reach controls at the bottom of the page.
Here’s a great list of checkpoints from the article So You think You’ve built a Good Infinite Scroll by Adrian Roselli that’s worth checking before you consider implementing infinite scroll.
Performance costs
- Memory bloat: The DOM grows endlessly. Every new batch of items adds more DOM nodes, images, event listeners, and CSS reflows. This just keeps appending content indefinitely and this could lead to sluggish performance.
- SEO challenges: Infinite scroll often hides content outside of a crawler’s field of vision. Search engine crawlers typically only see the initially loaded content, not what appears later as you scroll. If the crawler can’t access that extra content, it can’t index it — which means large parts of your page may remain invisible in search results.
Better alternatives
You don’t have to ditch dynamic loading — just give users the control.
- Pagination: With pagination — simply splitting content into different pages and linking to these pages at the foot of a page — users have a sense of where they are in the information hierarchy. They know how many pages they have to navigate and they get to choose whether they go to those pages or not. Seen in that light, pagination gives users back the control that infinite scroll takes from them.
- “Load More” button: This involves showing a certain number of results per page; below these results there is a button that asks if a user wants to see more. Again, this lets users decide when to fetch more content. One thing to note — place new content after the “Load more” button, not before, so the focus order remains logical, and keyboard-only and screen reader users can continue navigating forward, without being disoriented. (If the additional content was placed before the button, and the focus remained on the button, how would a keyboard-only or screen reader user get back to the start of the content that had been added?)
Some users rely on landmark regions (,
, etc.) to quickly jump around content — so far, screen readers are the only assistive technology to fully support this. Providing landmarks for content that comes after the infinitely scrolling area of the page may seem like a solution — but it won’t help keyboard-only users. So, it’s not a complete fix today, though it might become more effective in the future.
If you’re a keyboard-only user, or a web content author, and would like to navigate landmark regions via the keyboard, or visualise the landmark structure of your page in the developer tools panel, you could use an extension such as the Landmarks browser extension.
Final thoughts
Infinite scroll isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution. When used without due care, it creates more problems than it solves. However, with thoughtful design we could enhance the experience allowing all users to access the web content and functionality. Ultimately, giving users control is the key to a better experience.
