"My main page has been misconfigured; the number of posts I set is not showing."
This is not a misconfiguration but rather the design of Blogger itself to optimize page loading. It's Blogger's auto pagination.
And what is auto-pagination?
It is the dynamic and automatic adjustment that Blogger performs to speed up the loading of any index-type page of a given blog, based on (a) the amount of HTML (in kilobytes) and (b) the number of images on the page.
In other words, on those pages that display more than one post and, according to Blogger, contain too much content, the number of posts is determined independently of our established settings.
How to deal with it?
Since auto pagination is triggered by 'too much content' on index pages (home, archives, tags, search), the content in the posts should be reduced.
And no, I'm not saying we should make short posts or ones with few images; we need to make the blog load efficiently.
Use the 'Insert line break' button
"And what are you saying? If my theme ALREADY does this automatically..." Let’s say you configure your dashboard to show 10 posts, but only 5 actually appear on the page. Why does this happen?
By default, Blogger's server extracts the complete HTML content of those 10 posts (text, massive hidden images, scripts, recipe cards, you name it) and loads it all into memory to process your template. However, Blogger enforces a strict page weight limit of approximately 1 MB.
If your posts are content-heavy, the first 5 or 6 might hit that internal limit immediately. When that happens, Blogger automatically cuts off the query as a safety measure to keep the server and browser from crashing. As a result, it only displays 5 entries, completely ignoring the 10 you requested in your settings.
And here is the crucial detail: this happens with absolutely any template. It makes no difference whether you are using a typical 3rd-party theme that drags all that heavy content into the browser and relies on scripts to truncate the text or if you are using official Blogger themes (or my custom-built themes 😉) where we use native tags to process excerpts directly on the server for drastically faster loading speeds. Because that 1 MB limit is triggered on the server before the template can even render the final design, your pagination will get cut off exactly the same way.
This is where the Insert jump break button comes into play. You can find it right in the post editor. Ideally, you should use it after your first paragraph and image, especially if it's your featured image.
Below is a short animation showing how to use it.
It is also recommended to truncate the blog feed at the jump break; this can be done in Settings > Site Feed > Allow blog feed:
The "Insert jump break" button, combined with a feed truncated, allows us to reduce the amount of content displayed on index pages.
Note: If the Dynamic Views theme is chosen, it’s not recommended to use line breaks or a truncated feed.
Optimize images and text
Yes, this topic is already a broken record, because of SEO. But we really do need optimized images to avoid auto pagination.
Ideally, use images that:
- Use the right size. If the post body width is 700px, don't upload a 3000px image.
- Use the appropriate formats; on a blog, there’s no need for a TIFF file, which, although it will look great, will negatively impact loading performance.
- Avoid copying and pasting images into the editor, doing that creates base64 code images that makes the post too heavy.
- Compressed images, ensuring that they don't lose too much quality.
- Upload the just and necessary. Nothing in excess is good.
- Blogger also offers the option to convert images to WebP, further improving their loading speed.
Can be enabled (by turning the toggle green) in Settings > Posts > WebP image serving.
When it comes to text, it's best to format the content directly in Blogger.
I know it's usually more convenient to do it in other editors, but unfortunately when you transfer that content to Blogger, it comes with a lot of HTML code that will undoubtedly interfere with the site's functionality and also negatively impact how quickly the post or page loads.
Therefore, it's good practice to remove all external formatting from the text using the "Clear formatting" button located near the insert jump break button.
Once the text is clean of external code, we can proceed to format it using the options provided by the Blogger editor.
In Windows and some Linux distributions, we can use CTRL + SPACE to remove the formatting of the selected text.
Related guide: Clear the text format in Blogger.
Don't exaggerate with the number of posts.
The number of posts on the homepage (and those that appear when you click "More Posts" or "Older Posts") is adjusted in Settings > Posts > Max posts shown on main page.
For other pages, such as tag or search pages, we don’t really control this. But we can use ?max-results=number by adding it to the URL of any of these pages, say in the menu.
<a href='/search/label/LABEL?max-results=8'>LABEL</a>What I'm outlining here are guidelines that, if applied consistently, will keep the site loading optimally and prevent the annoyance of seeing less content than desired due to auto pagination. It's just a matter of blogging routine.