Hello friends,

If you are hardcore WordPress fans you may have clicked very often on two famous links – “Older posts” and “Newer posts”. Yup, these two paging navigation links are needed especially when browsing a WordPress blog in order to see more of its posts.

The philosophy of WordPress is to use these links but what if you could be able to replace them with some other links? Wouldn’t that be just awesome?

The great news is that there is a solution that will allow you to achieve this. It is extremely easy to use and setup. The name of this WordPress plugin is WP-PageNavi.

Why should you use WP-PageNavi?

Most because you are a 100% fan of unique content. And while your posts and pages pass all SEO rules in that matter, why shouldn’t your paging navigation stand out from the crowd as well? Plus having a unique and catchy text for these two links might just cause the users to click on them. That is why you need to consider this plugin when building your next WordPress website or when you need to update the look&feel of your current one.

OK, but can’t I just rename the strings for these links when I translate my WordPress theme?

You may add different text when translating the PO and MO files for your theme, yes! And you will achieve a similar effect but that will last as long as you use the current theme. And only if you are using a different language than its default one. So, no – translating the strings in the theme files is not a suitable solution.

OK, so how to use WP-PageNavi?

First of all you need to pass through the usual procedure – download, install and activate the plugin. After you are done with this you need to head to your WordPress dashboard. Then click on Settings -> PageNavi. Now you need to adjust the WP-PageNavi’s options in order to start benefiting from its usage.

First of all you need to enter a text for the number of pages. Pay special attention the the attributes for each field. They are described below each field box and the main idea here is to write your custom text around them. For example if you want to change the default “Page X of Y” to “You are now reading page № X of our Y total pages” the right way to do it is to add the following strings:

You are now reading page № %CURRENT_PAGE% of our %TOTAL_PAGES% total pages

Simple, right? Now you can activate your creativity and think of the most suitable text for your website. The same applies for all the other field boxes and to be more specific you can adjust a custom text for:

• current page;
• page;
• first page;
• last page;
• previous page;
• next page;
• previous;
• next;

Bear in mind that you are free to use symbols as well. For example in the screenshot above you can see that the following symbols are used: “<<, >>, … “.

Don’t forget that you can also leave some of the fields empty. In this case they will be hidden from the navigation as they are blank.

In the WP-PageNavi settings you need to decide whether or not you want to use the pagenavi-css.css. You also need to choose the page navigation style and also to decide if you want the navigation to be always shown even if there is only one page on your WordPress website.

And that’s it! Now you can enjoy your new custom texts for your WordPress paging navigation.

What do you think, friends? Would you use WP-PageNavi? Share any thoughts, questions and suggestions in the comments below.

See you soon!

*The image is embedded from the WordPress.org page of WP-PageNavi