From time to time, a client requests specific functionality on their website that I have never implemented before.

In the case of the Spoonful Publishing website, owner Anthea wanted her portfolio to look amazing. For an artist or designer, this is completely unsurprising! But what was a little unusual is that she wanted the portfolio to have infinite scrolling – so when a visitor scrolled to the bottom of the page, new entries would automatically load.

The Genesis child theme that we were working from didn’t already include this functionality, so I needed to do some research to work out the best way to set it up. I wanted to make sure that page loading time and user experience wasn’t compromised, while at the same time offering an elegant way to load entries.

So I started looking at plugins.

Jetpack, the amazing multi-tool plugin, has a lovely infinite scroll module that can be activated. But I just couldn’t get it to work with the “portfolio” post type in my Genesis child theme. Then I found the Jetpack Infinite Scroll For Genesis plugin. Excitedly, I installed and activated it, but still couldn’t get it to work properly. It was loading the featured image for several entries just fine, but then started to load complete portfolio entries, which wasn’t what I wanted.

Finally, I came across the YITH Infinite Scrolling plugin. After playing around a bit with the settings to get it working, but eventually, it worked! Hurrah! These were the settings I used to make it work for the Genesis child theme Minimum Pro:

I would only recommend infinite scrolling if there is no important information in the footer of your website. It’s bad for usability if your visitor is trying to get to the bottom of the page and it keeps automatically being pushed away! But infinite scrolling can be a graceful method to dynamically load entries for a blog, gallery, or portfolio.

Have you set up infinite scrolling before? Or is there another new plugin that you have recently tried out? Comment here to let me know!