By Lesson 24, our Flipnzee Auctions plugin already supports:

• Creating auctions
• Viewing all auctions
• Editing auctions
• Deleting auctions
• Displaying professional success/error notices

However, there is still one major limitation.

If your marketplace eventually contains hundreds or even thousands of auctions, displaying every auction on a single page becomes slow and difficult to use.

WordPress solves this problem with pagination, and since we’re already using WP_List_Table, adding it is surprisingly straightforward.

In this lesson, we’ll make our Auctions page production-ready by adding pagination.

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Why Pagination Matters

Imagine your marketplace has:

• 500 active auctions
• 2,000 completed auctions
• 15,000 historical auctions

Loading every record at once would:

• increase page load time
• consume unnecessary memory
• make scrolling frustrating
• reduce the overall admin experience

Instead, WordPress displays only a limited number of records per page.

Example:

Showing 20 auctions per page

Page 1
Page 2
Page 3
...
Page 150

This is how professional WordPress plugins behave.

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How WP_List_Table Supports Pagination

The class already provides pagination support.

We only need to tell WordPress:

• how many total items exist
• how many items to display per page
• which page the user is currently viewing

WordPress automatically creates:

• Previous button
• Next button
• Page numbers
• Current page indicator

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Current Problem

Our current prepare_items() method probably looks similar to this:

$this->items = Flipnzee_Auction_Manager::get_all_auctions();

This loads every auction.

Instead, we should only load the current page.

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Step 1 — Count Total Auctions

First, determine how many auctions exist.

Example:

$total_items =
	Flipnzee_Auction_Manager::count_auctions();

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Step 2 — Decide Items Per Page

Choose how many auctions should appear on each page.

Example:

$per_page = 20;

Twenty items per page is a common default in WordPress.

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Step 3 — Determine the Current Page

WordPress passes the current page automatically.

Example:

$current_page = $this->get_pagenum();

If the user clicks Page 4,

$current_page = 4

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Step 4 — Calculate Database Offset

SQL needs to know where to begin.

Formula:

Offset =
(Current Page − 1)
×
Items Per Page

Example:

Page 1

Offset = 0

Page 2

Offset = 20

Page 3

Offset = 40

Only the required rows are retrieved.

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Step 5 — Retrieve Only the Required Auctions

Instead of fetching everything:

SELECT *
FROM auctions

retrieve only the current page.

Example SQL:

SELECT *
FROM auctions
LIMIT 20 OFFSET 40

This loads only the records needed for the current page.

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Step 6 — Configure Pagination

Finally, tell WP_List_Table how many pages exist.

Example:

$this->set_pagination_args(
	array(
		'total_items' => $total_items,
		'per_page'    => $per_page,
	)
);

WordPress calculates the number of pages automatically.

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The Result

Instead of one endlessly long table:

Auction 1
Auction 2
Auction 3
...
Auction 2000

your users will see:

Auction 1
Auction 2
...
Auction 20

← Previous

1 2 3 4 5

Next →

This provides a cleaner and faster administration experience.

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Why This Matters

Pagination is not just about convenience.

It also:

• Improves performance
• Reduces memory usage
• Speeds up database queries
• Makes large datasets manageable
• Follows WordPress admin standards
• Prepares your plugin for production use

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What You’ll Learn Next

In Lesson 26, we’ll add sortable columns to the Auctions table so administrators can sort auctions by:

• Auction ID
• Listing ID
• Start Price
• Buy Now Price
• Status
• Creation Date

Sorting and pagination together make your auction management screen feel like a professional WordPress plugin rather than a basic prototype.