WordPress.com sites get infinite scrolling, ‘the future of the web’

This is cool. Well for people who read the web at any rate. For advertisers, maybe not so much. WordPress.com sites are set to come standard with scrolling.

What this basically means is that when you reach the end of a post, you can just keep scrolling down and the next post will load.

According WordPress.com’s Lance Willet, this is the way the web will work in the future:

Instead of the old way of navigating down a page by scrolling and then clicking a link to get to the next page, waiting for a page refresh — the document model of the web — infinite scrolling pulls the next set of posts automatically into view when the reader approaches the bottom of the page, more like an application.

Willet claims that the blog-hosting service has “taken care of the details like integrating with your theme design as seamlessly as possible and supporting sites with footer widgets”.

It also says it’s made sure that people won’t get frustrated won’t get frustrated if they want to get back to the top of the page.

According to Willet: “as you scroll down a subtle footer pops up containing your blog title, which readers can click to scroll back up”.

He also reckons that the new style is better for people running sites:

The metrics from infinite scrolling are conclusive: people are reading more posts and spending more time on your sites. As you might guess, people are more likely to just scroll down than they were to click the old style links—the new way is faster and better.

As of March 2012, there were some 71-million individual blogs with the service.

It should be noted that blogs running on WordPress.com are distinct from sites using it as a Content Management System (CMS).

If you’d prefer not to have infinite scrolling on your site, go to Settings → Reading, you’ll instead see a “Load more posts” button at the bottom of the page. This option loads the next available content quickly after the button is clicked — avoiding a full-page reload.