Why Your Shopify Collection Page Has a "Load More" Button That's Quietly Ending Shopping Sessions That Should Have Converted

The Button Nobody Thinks to Question

When we pull up Hotjar session recordings on a mid-volume Shopify collection page, there is one pattern that shows up so consistently it stops being surprising. A shopper lands on the collection, scrolls through the first twelve or sixteen products, hits the "Load More" button, and then leaves. Not immediately. They wait a second or two, the page loads additional products, and then they close the tab.

The button worked. The products loaded. And the shopper still left.

Store owners see this in their analytics and assume the shopper just was not interested. But when we look at the scroll depth data alongside session recordings, a different story emerges. These shoppers were engaged. They scrolled past the fold. They clicked into product images. They used filters. Then they hit "Load More," something subtle broke their momentum, and they were gone.

This is not a hypothetical edge case. It is one of the most consistently underdiagnosed conversion leaks we find in collection page audits on stores doing anywhere from $2M to $20M in annual revenue.

What's Actually Happening When a Shopper Hits Load More

The problem is not the button itself. The problem is what happens to the shopper's mental state when they have to push it.

Pagination and "Load More" mechanics create a decision point. The shopper has already processed twelve or sixteen products. Their brain is making a calculation: is it worth continuing? That calculation is happening unconsciously, but the moment they have to take a deliberate action to see more products, they are suddenly aware that they are working to find something. That awareness breaks the passive browsing state that drives impulse and considered purchases alike.

There is a secondary issue that makes this worse. On most Shopify themes, when a shopper clicks "Load More," the page either reloads to the top or the new products load with a small animation that shifts the layout. On mobile, where the majority of DTC traffic arrives, this shift is jarring. The shopper loses their place. If they accidentally scroll up to see the page repaint, they are now back at the top of a collection they already scanned and they have no clear way to return to where they were.

We audited a skincare brand doing around $4M annually that had a twelve product per page load limit on their "Best Sellers" collection, which was their highest traffic collection page from paid social. Their paid social was landing shoppers mid-funnel with strong buying intent. GA4 showed an average session duration of under 90 seconds on that page and a 78% exit rate. Hotjar showed the majority of those exits happening within three seconds of the "Load More" interaction. Switching to infinite scroll, combined with a sticky "Back to Top" button, dropped the exit rate on that page by 19 points within the first three weeks.

Why Infinite Scroll is Not Always the Answer Either

Before you open your theme settings and flip the toggle, the nuance matters here.

Infinite scroll solves the momentum problem but creates a different one if the implementation is careless. The most common version of this problem: a shopper on infinite scroll browses deep into a collection, clicks into a product page to look at images, then hits the browser back button. On most Shopify themes with basic infinite scroll, this sends the shopper back to the top of the collection. The position is not preserved.

We see this kill conversion for shoppers who are genuinely in a deep comparison mode, which is actually one of the highest-value shopper profiles on any collection page. They are not bouncing because they are uninterested. They are working through your catalog trying to find the right product. When you snap them back to position zero every time they use the back button, you are training them to open products in a new tab instead of trusting your navigation, and eventually they stop bothering.

The fix is scroll position preservation. Some Shopify themes handle this natively. Many do not. There are apps that address it, and custom implementations using browser session storage are reliable if your developer knows what they are doing. Before assuming your infinite scroll is working correctly, test it manually: browse deep into a collection, click a product, hit back, and see exactly where you land. If you land at the top, you have the problem.

A home goods brand we worked with had infinite scroll enabled but no scroll position preservation. Session recordings in Hotjar showed a pattern where shoppers clicked back to the collection from a product page, immediately closed the tab, and did not return. Once scroll position was preserved, their collection to product page click-through rate increased because shoppers were willing to open and close products without losing their place.

The Right Architecture Depends on Your Catalog Size

The correct pagination approach is not universal. It depends on how many SKUs are in a given collection and what kind of decision your shopper is making.

For collections with fewer than 30 products, infinite scroll with position preservation is almost always the right call. The shopper can reach the bottom of the catalog without breaking their flow, and there is no meaningful performance cost to loading everything progressively.

For collections with more than 60 products, infinite scroll without very clear visual landmarks creates a different kind of fatigue. Shoppers lose track of where they are in the catalog and have no sense of how much is left to review. In these cases, a hybrid approach works better: load 24 to 36 products by default, use a clearly labeled "Load More" button that shows remaining product count ("Load 24 more of 87 products"), and preserve scroll position on back navigation. The remaining product count is important because it reframes the interaction. Instead of the button feeling like an arbitrary barrier, it gives the shopper information that helps them decide whether to continue or refine their filter choices.

For very large collections, above 100 products, filter improvements will do more conversion work than pagination mechanics. If shoppers cannot narrow the catalog before they start scrolling, no pagination model will save them from decision fatigue.

What to Check in Your Own Store This Week

Pull your top three collection pages by traffic in GA4. Look at exit rate and average session duration. Then open Hotjar or whatever session recording tool you use and filter for sessions that ended on those collection pages. Watch specifically for the moment the shopper left. If you see repeated exits at the scroll depth where your initial product batch ends, or within a few seconds of a "Load More" interaction, you have identified the problem.

Check your back button behavior manually on mobile. That test alone has surfaced an issue on almost every store we have audited where the team was confident their scroll implementation was working.

These are not dramatic fixes. They are not the kind of tests that make for exciting case studies. But they are the type of structural problems that sit quietly underneath your paid traffic and drain the value out of every collection page visit you paid to get.

If you want a full audit that covers how your collection pages, product pages, and checkout flow together as a system, that is what our conversion audit is designed to surface. We look at the mechanics most teams overlook because they are focused on creative and copy when the architecture is the actual problem.