There’s something i have never really liked in WordPress, it’s the “older posts” / “previous posts” links. Simply because a site using this “pagination” method doesn’t give any information to the visitor about the number of published posts. I prefer having a nice pagination that clearly shows that there are “x” posts, it gives me an idea about the website i’m currently visiting. That’s why i’m going to explain in the above lines how to create a simple but nice pagination in just a few lines of code.

The paginate_links() function is our saver

First of all you have to know something: WordPress core developers have nearly always a solution for us, and this is what i like in WordPress. There’s always a function, a bit of code on the codex, to help us creating great stuff. This is the case with the paginate_links() function. So, in the code above what we are doing is getting the total pages number that we put inside the $total variable. Then, we get the current page, and then the permalink format (don’t forget to set up a SEO friendly permalink structure). Just paste the PHP code where you want the pagination to appear and the CSS code inside your style.css file (in your theme directory), and that’s it ! You can view the result here or here!

The code