Plain and boring pages are no longer in demand these days. When it comes to modern website design, local businesses like to be creative and unique, and that means that the web design professionals of today have to keep up with this trend. Any talented and up-to-date developer should be able to incorporate new trends such as infinite scrolling into websites, whenever the situation calls for it.

What Exactly is Infinite Scrolling?

Basically, it’s a webpage that automatically loads the content down the page. You don’t have to click on the next page icon to see what’s next; you just scroll down until you find what you seek.

One very familiar example of this is the image search function in Google. You search for a name of your favorite actress, and the pictures appear. You scroll down continuously until you tire of the whole thing or when the pictures available are no longer even slightly related to the search parameters you typed in. There are various forms of this infinite scrolling, such as parallax and inline. The most popular today being parallax, it has great potential, but is hampered by it’s incompatibility with responsive design.

Some Other Pros and Cons

The main advantage of infinite scrolling is that it can cut through all that waiting time for a page to load. As many Toronto website design experts can tell you, a lot of Internet users tend to be impatient fellows. If they have to wait more than 7 seconds for a page to load, chances are they’ll just click out and find another page—or find another website. A lot of websites today offer massive amounts of data to their visitors, and infinite scrolling provides visitors with an efficient way of looking over all that information.
But there are also several disadvantages to infinite scrolling:

It may prove quite distracting to some viewers. Website visitors can get lost in all that data and fail to differentiate which information is relevant or not. For eCommerce sites, this can mean that your visitors may not be as willing to click on the results you want them to. It can waste a lot of time for some people as well. Many users tend to scroll down either out of curiosity as to what’s coming next or out of optimism that the next results can bring what they’re looking for. Either way, a lot of time is spent on looking at results and not on clicking them. Infinite scrolling also uses up a lot of memory. Some visitors complain that visiting a website with infinite scrolling can slow down their browsing experience to a crawl. A few even comment that it’s just as slow as the old dial-up experience!

When is it best to Use Infinite Scrolling?

Just like any other technology, infinite scrolling can be used efficiently, and it can also be misused. So when is it appropriate to use it for your site?

Use it when your content is represented by images. It’s not an accident that Google uses this for their image search but doesn’t use it for their regular website search.Use it if your site has a lot of user-generated content. If you want to consider using infinite scrolling for your website, a website design Toronto expert can evaluate its usefulness for your site and advise you whether or not it’s a viable option.