Description
Auto Infinite Scroll is a lightweight, scalable infinite scroll plugin. It automatically configures itself for WooCommerce, but it works on all your pagination.
It means that instead of users paging between results, they can just scroll down and keep scrolling. For users on all platforms, but especially phones and tablets, this is a godsend.
It triggers page 2, page 3 loading events so you can see these pages in Google Analytics, but critically – it retains memory of the last archive page in the users browser. This means that if/when a user clicks through to a specific product page or a specific post page, when they click the back button in the browser they return to the exact spot they were at before with no further loading required.
That means that auto infinite scroll is very user friendly.
- Lets users scroll down instead of paging between products
- Page hits still occur in Google Analytics for page 2, 3 etc
- Has special code to store the extended page (page 1 + 2 + 3 etc) in browser memory, so if the user goes to a product page and then hits the browser back button, they end up back exactly where they left off. Other plugins force the user to scroll down again, or only include that single page
- This advanced code eliminates massive amounts of server usage from your website, allowing more scalability
Automatically Configured
There is no configuration required. Install, activate, and visit your WooCommerce archive pages to see it working.
Why Auto Infinite Scroll helps scalability
If you’re using Scalability Pro, there is an option within Scalability Pro to disable pagination. What that means is it will disable the calculations of how many pages there – with large stores, for example large affiliate stores – if you are calculating the number of products per shop, category, filter-set, then something called ‘table scans’ will be happening and causing extreme slowness on your site. What you really want is for your indexes to be used and only the data that is being displayed on page to be read.
When you disable pagination with Scalability Pro, the queries that generate your archive pages no longer know how many pages there are. Scalability Pro pretends that there are 100 pages, even though there might only be 5.
With no page counts, you can hide the ‘total products’ and just let users keep hitting next or page 100+ etc or you can use infinite scroll.
Our infinite scroll has been built to be fast, and reduces server resource in a smart way by remembering the archive in the browser storage. For example:
- User scrolls down your archive, reaches page 3
- User clicks a product
- User clicks back – this is where other infinite scroll plugins break – they perhaps just load page 3, making scrolling up weird, or they refetch page 1, 2 & 3 using up more server resource
Instead of that, our plugin at step 2 above records the archive HTML in the browser storage and the users scrolling position and sets them again with no need for a server hit when the user clicks back. That massively speeds up the feel of your site.
Another performance boost is provided by storing the archive/shop pages in the browser storage area. This means, when a user scrolls to page 3 then clicks a product, visits the product detail page, then clicks back, no further server resources are consumed.
Great User Experience
The Auto Infinite Scroll plugin provides a great user experience too. Users are used to scrolling down to view more products, but on top of that, when a user visits a product detail page and then clicks back, with our browser storage model, the user ends up back immediately on their previous page – unlike other plugins where your users will end up back at the top of the product list waiting for page 2 and 3 to load again.
You can also see a demo of this plugin in action on our demo shop. https://www.foundthru.com/shop
RENE J. (verified owner) –
Due to the good experiences with other first-class plugins from wpintense (Scalability Pro, faster-woo-widgets), we immediately purchased the lifetime licence for WPI Auto Infinite Scroll without thinking. The plugin works great and is a good extension for our (especially mobile) visitors. The support (also individual problems) immediately responded to our wishes and also suggestions for improvement. A forum is available for customers, which provides solutions within a very short time!
Anthony A. –
I usually avoid giving unfavourable reviews in public and prefer to contact the plugin authors in private as I do not wish to affect their business. However, I have no choice but need to resort to writing this review here.
This plugin author Dave provides extremely poor support. I had sent him many support request emails with no reply. This is vastly unlike other plugin authors who promptly reply and fix any issues within several hours.
This plugin persistently gives this error “Creating default object from empty value in /home/whi2/wp-content/plugins/auto-infinite-scroll/plugin-updates/plugin-update-checker.php on line 224 “.
Instead of fixing this problem, Dave told me to turn off the debug notice in wp-config.php. I had subsequently sent him many emails, asking if turning off the debug would be a risky measure and whether he intends to come up with a patch for this problem. He simply refuses to reply.
Dave, please issue me a refund. There are problems with several of your plugins and I am not getting technical support/help from you.
Thanks.
Dave H. –
Hi – I’m really sorry about the poor level of support the past week and a half. I’ve been relocating from Scotland to Greece.
I’ll contact you through our chat system regarding your refund.
As for the warning in the plugin, I think maybe you’re on an older version of the plugin? If so, please re-download the latest version from your account page since there was an older version which had a bug around the auto-update, so updates weren’t happening properly.
Sven J. –
Extremely bad support! didn’t have any update or fedback for months. Created a Slack channel but the response rate is even poor than using email to communicate.
Anon –
Sorry – my main support guy moved to another country so July/beginning of August was tough.
Chris W. –
After already seeing huge speed increases with the Scalability Pro plugin I decided to purchase the rest of the plugins in the WPI Performance Pack, including this Auto Infinite Scroll plugin. Within a few minutes I had configured the wrapper parameters and I was up an running. It works perfectly!!
A great feature is when the user clicks on a product from the shop page and then clicks the “back” button this plugin remembers where they were on the shop page and saves them scrolling back down to where they were – this is something I’ve never seen before and I’ve used ALOT of infinite scrollers!
By combining the plugins from the WPIntense I now have a WordPress site with over 5k items on an average server with load times of under 3secs! I really can’t rate WPIntense enough. In a competitive online world customer experience is everything and WPIntense have realised this. Thanks for everything!
Bart R. –
This plugin is fucking up my website, and support from WP intense is very poor…..
Anon –
I’m truly sorry you had a bad experience with this plugin. I have many people using it successfully but there WAS an issue with certain themes/plugins if they loaded jQuery twice. This caused the plugin’s JavaScript code to fail which could in turn cause other JavaScript to fail.
I’ve recoded the way the JavaScript works in the plugin so that even if jQuery is loaded multiple times (a bad idea for many reasons) it will not break.