By real pagination i mean something like this when in page 3:
<<Previous 1 | 2 | {3} | 4 | 5 |...| 15 | Next>>
By Next and Previous buttons i mean something like this when in page 3:
<<previous Next>>
Performance wise im sure the Previous and Next Buttons are better since unlike the real pagination it doesn’t require over-querying the database. By over-querying the database i mean getting more information from the database than what you will need to display on the page.
My theory is that the Previous and Next Buttons can drastically increase a site performance as it only requires the exact information you will need to display on a page, please correct me if im wrong on this.
so,
do users really have preference when it comes to this two options?
is it just a Developer preference and its convenience?
Which one do you prefer? why?
*Note: Previous and Next Buttons are usually labeled Newer and older.
When I was inexperienced, I made a site and opted for Next/previous. I happened to work on that site yesterday, and that was one of the things I considered a novice mistake. There shouldn’t be a performance difference, and if there is it’s negligible compared to your users frustration a the extra clicks required to go down the list.
Your users experience is way more important than saving a few cpu cycles. You may say, “But what if the site gets insanely popular and goes down because of my resource intensive pagination links?” my reply would be, “How did a site that is hard to use get so popular?” (I would also suspect that the pagination was not the real culprit)