Elementor Pagination Widget

The Problem

WordPress. At it's core, a blogging platform. It's pretty obvious that posts should be ordered by time. You want the latest post at the top of the page, so that's ordered by time descending. Makes perfect sense.

So when you're reading some random post, then you'd like to read the next one in sequence. Good idea to have some navigation buttons to let you do that: next post and previous post. Now a regular human would think the next one would be the next one down a list of posts, the next earliest post.

But WordPress didn't do that. Instead, the WP developers decided that the "next" post should be the next newest one, forward in time. Opposite to the order on a summary page. Now for a blog, this is weird but not really a huge problem. If you call posts "older" and "newer", users get that.

But sadly people don't just blog with WP anymore. They build large, complex sites. They build collections of pages that aren't always ordered by chronology, and where users expect the next button to take them to the next page/post.

Turns out this is a pretty common problem.

The (not so great) Solution

There's a couple of fixes for this. You can hack the WP core, which is a Very Bad Idea. Just don't. You can hack the theme, which is an almost equally bad idea. You can create a child theme and hack that, which is merely a moderately bad idea. Child themes are great, hacking at them, not so much. Besides, do that and all your post navigation changes and now blog posts seem backwards. You want to be able to do both.

Not to mention that one of the reasons why people use something like WordPress is because they don't want to or know how to go hacking into code.

We had a client who had this problem and got in touch with us for a fix. Now we're making it available to everyone.

The (Elementor specific) Solution

Elementor is a very powerful WordPress theme that lets users build beautiful sites without knowing a lot of low level HTML/CSS stuff. Elementor has a nice Post Navigation Widget that ties a group of pages together and provides next/previous navigation. This is great for things like moving through a portfolio. Problem is, it only provides the usual WP navigation order. This can be confusing and even when it's not it's not exactly great UX.

Here's a screenshot showing the default Post Navigation Widget and then ours:

Our client says this widget is worth $300, but they build gorgeous high-end websites and have budgets to match. We think it should be more accessible than that, but we're leaving the option open. you can get the widget via Ko‑fi for $30 (or more if you think it's worth it).