What are you thinking? Websites that keep content loading as you scroll

I don’t know who the genius is behind the sites that keeps loading content as you scroll down the page (known as lazy loading or infinite scrolling). Just don’t do it. Some sites are just making the content look like it loads, but others do load it on the fly. I get the idea of just loading part of the site on the fly, so that the user will see the page quicker. The problem is it doesn’t make sense to keep loading the page as you scroll down it.

This functionality is really irritating when you want to get to the links at the bottom of the page in the footer. Oh there is the footer...uh oh it is gone again. Who wants to scroll ten to twenty times to finally reach the footer in hopes of finding the link you want like customer service. Not going to get a friendly email if they are writing to you with a problem now. Not a very user friendly design in my opinion.

Then there is another potential issue: say after scrolling 10 times, you decide you want to go somewhere else on the site. If you don’t have a sticky menu or back to top option, you have to scroll a bunch to get back up to your menu. Again I don’t see that as a fun user experience.

Is the search engine going to index your whole page properly with this method? Probably not, since last I checked search engines don’t scroll. Now I suppose if you checked who the visitor was and if it was a search engine and fed them the whole page of content it would then get indexed. That sort of defeats the purpose of using it for fast loading. Yes, it is great the user gets to see the page quicker, but what about the search engine. It doesn’t see the speed benefit. You want the search engine to see the speed benefit. They like fast loading pages, which helps with your SEO.

I can see this technique maybe being used for one or two scrolls, but there needs to be a stopping point for it. At that point pagination needs to be used or an option to load more. I feel back buttons are more user friendly than a bunch of scrolling. I would avoid using the load content as the page is loading method. Pagination is a better method for loading content that goes together instead of showing everything on one page. Search engines like it better too and that is who is ranking your site.

Check out the website Nike for example. Go to a product category like Mens Pants & Tights and as you scroll it keeps loading products. You can't get to the footer very well until all the product loads. They do at least make the menu reappear when you scroll up a tad. I guess one place where infinate scrolling doesn't really bother me is social media. In general it is not something I'm a fan of.