Is it wise to paginate category pages?

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

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  Hayk Saakian: Test your competitions pages to see if it really makes a difference.
  
  For example if they all load in 4-5 seconds, then improving from 2.95 to 2.3s won`t really make a difference.
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  Daniel Fonda: You should DEFINITELY paginate category pages, or code in a AJAX load more button (either infinite scroll or by button press). I`ve seen too many sites just dump 500 products on a single archive page, due to not knowing how to do pagination, resulting in a ridiculous number of page requests before the page can be loaded. Remember... every single product has a featured image, if not coded properly; every single product will have a bunch of markup data (html classes, etc.), not to mention any non cached png/svg icons, etc.
  If you need a hand with implementing pagination or AJAX loadmore functionality, do drop me a PM - I`d love to point you in the right direction.
• 
  Stockbridge Truslow: Yes. Paginate them. But you can also have a "View All" link - maybe.
  
  Users can get overwhelmed with too much info on a page. So I like to provide it in digestible chunks. If I start to get more than 3 pages (it looks like you are only at 3 pages if you`re doing 24 per page in your example) I like to look at the products and see if there is a way I can classify them even more specifically - both to help the user find what they are looking for and to keep the overwhelming factor down. So rather than browsing 5 pages of things, I can hopefully break that down into two new sub-categories of 2 or 3 pages each - or even 3 new categories of 1-2 pages each.
  
  What you want to do is make sure you have proper prev-next tags. If you go the "View All" option (as a user choice, not the default) - then you can canonicalize each broken up page to the view all page - but make sure you still have the prev-next tags set up properly. Google will understand that relationship. Only do the View All option if you`re under 100 products, though. I picked that number arbitrarily - it might actually be a lower number that is optimal. Hard to say without experimenting.
  
  https://webmasters.googleblog.com/.../pagination-with...
  
  NOTE: If you have a halfway decent theme - it probably already does this. I believe Yoast (and probably other SEO plugins) will inject this properly on its own as well. Check your tags and search for "prev" or "next" on one of you archive pages and see.
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  Bjornen Nilsson: Always pagination or a load more.
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  Neil Cheesman: I understand that... but I guess subjective where to draw the line on one page or pagination... ie `user experience`
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  Bjornen Nilsson: Neil Cheesman I recommend 6-10 "per load" on mobile if using a 2-grid layout (2 per row) and between 16-20 on desktop.