Previous/next navigation

Previous/next navigation

Automatically puts links to the previous and next item and back to the overview at the bottom of a detail page.

Previous/next navigation

Automatically puts three links at the bottom of a detail page: to the previous item, the next item and back to the overview. The links are filled in by themselves — you only choose the labels and optionally a filter so browsing stays within the same category. The technical name is RecordNav.

Add RecordNav to any detail page template that's part of a series — blog posts, documentation pages, product detail pages — so visitors can move through the set without going back to the overview every time. Because the links are computed from the same ordering and filters as the overview list, they never go stale when records are added, removed or reordered.

Pass a filter matching the overview's filter (the same category or tag, for example) so navigation stays within a logical group. It pairs naturally with a Records overview and Breadcrumbs at the top of the same page.

Typical use cases

A webshop product page typically uses RecordNav filtered to the same category, so 'next' moves to the next item in that category rather than jumping across the entire catalogue — a shopper browsing running shoes shouldn't land on kitchenware. A portfolio site uses it to move between case studies in project order, letting a visitor read straight through a body of work the way they'd flip through a printed book. A knowledge-base or documentation site benefits most directly: pairing RecordNav with a per-topic filter keeps readers moving through a coherent sequence of articles instead of jumping between unrelated topics.

Common mistakes

The filter passed to RecordNav should match the filter used on the overview page it's paired with — if the overview only lists 'featured' items but RecordNav has no such filter, next/previous can jump to items that were never shown on the overview at all, which feels inconsistent to a visitor retracing their steps. The same applies to sort order: if the overview sorts by date but RecordNav doesn't specify the same sort, 'next' and 'previous' can silently disagree with what the visitor saw on the list page.

Avoid placing RecordNav at the top of a detail page next to Breadcrumbs — both are navigational aids, but they serve different moments: Breadcrumbs orients a visitor on arrival, RecordNav offers where to go after they've read the content, so the bottom of the page is almost always the better spot. On a list page that already uses Pagination, think of the two as a pair: Pagination moves visitors across pages of the overview, RecordNav moves them across individual items once they're inside one.

Example

Look at the bottom of this page: the bar with '← All blocks' and the previous/next links is this block, live in action.

The prompt for this example

prompt
Put navigation to the previous and next block at the bottom of every block page, with a link back to the blocks overview.