If you don’t have pagination for your blog and you want to do it, this page is probably helpful to you.

My blog is constructed by Jekyll, so I will only write down how to paginate the blog powered by Jekyll. Actually below part are some experiences when I paginated my blog.

When you have a long post list, breaking them into smaller lists and display them over multiple pages will become a common requirement. Fortunately, Jekyll offers a pagination plugin, which can automatically generate the appropriate files and folders you need for paginated listings.

Install plugin

Add the jekyll-paginate into your website’s Gemfile and declare it at your configuration file _config.yml under plugins.

Like below Gemfile.

gemspec
group :jekyll_plugins do
    gem 'jekyll-feed'
    gem 'jekyll-sitemap'
    gem 'jekyll-paginate'
end

Enable pagination

Add a line to the _config.yml file that specifies how many items should be displayed per page:

paginate: 12

The number should be the maximum number of posts you’d like to be displayed per page in the generated site.

Because Jekyll can only support pagination for HTML files so far, do not work from within Markdown files from your Jekyll site. Pagination works when called from the HTML file, named index.html, which optionally may reside in and produce pagination from within a subdirectory, via the paginate_path configuration value.
You can specify the destination of the pagination pages:

paginate_path: "/blog/page:num/"

Jekyll will search the /blog/ directory and read in blog/index.html, send it to each pagination page, and write the output to blog/page:num/, where :num is the pagination page number, starting with 2.

For example, if you output 3 pages, if you look at the _site directory, you will find a /blog folder with two subfolders /page2 and /page3 in it. Each folder has an index.html file, which contains the contents that need to be displayed.

For me, I tried to set the path as below firstly, but failed to load the index.html. After I change to /blog/page:num, it started to work. Who can tell what the reason is here?

paginate_path: "/page:num/" 

Attributes

The pagination plugin exposes the paginator Liquid object.
You can find the attributes in my another blog Getting started with Jekyll (2)

Render the pages

You have enabled the pagination so far, next thing is to display your posts in a list using the paginator variable that will now be available to you. Below code is an example from my blog’s pagination.html file. These pieces of code renders a list of each page with links to all but the current page.

<!-- Pagination links -->
{% if paginator.total_pages > 1 %}
<div class="pagination">
  {% if paginator.previous_page %}
    <a href="{{ paginator.previous_page_path | prepend: site.baseurl | replace: '//', '/' }}">&laquo; Prev</a>
  {% else %}
    <span>&laquo; Prev</span>
  {% endif %}

  {% for page in (1..paginator.total_pages) %}
    {% if page == paginator.page %}
      <span class="active">{{ page }}</span>
    {% elsif page == 1 %}
      <a href="{{ '/blog/index.html' | prepend: site.baseurl | replace: '//', '/' }}">{{ page }}</a>
    {% else %}
      <a href="{{ site.paginate_path | prepend: site.baseurl | replace: '//', '/' | replace: ':num', page }}">{{ page }}</a>
    {% endif %}
{% endfor %}
  
  {% if paginator.next_page %}
    <a href="{{ paginator.next_page_path | prepend: site.baseurl | replace: '//', '/' }}">Next &raquo;</a>
  {% else %}
    <span>Next &raquo;</span>
  {% endif %}
</div>
{% endif %}

Besides, you still need to change your page.html or home.html where displays the every pages.
I moved these code to /blog/index.html from page.html and change the loop from site.posts to paginator.posts.
Below code loops through the paginated posts.

    {%- for post in paginator.posts -%}
      <li>
        {%- assign date_format = site.minimal.date_format | default: "%b %-d, %Y" -%}
        <a class="post-link" href="{{ post.url | relative_url }}">
          <h2 class="post-title">{{ post.title | escape }}</h2>
        </a>
        <div class="post-meta">
          <ul class="post-categories">
            {%- for tag in post.categories -%}
              <li>{{ tag }}</li>
            {%- endfor -%}
          </ul>
          <div class="post-date">
            <i class="icon-calendar"></i>
            {{ post.date | date: date_format }}</div>
        </div>
        <div class="post">
          {%- if site.show_excerpts -%}
            {{ post.excerpt }}
          {%- endif -%}
        </div>
		<footer>
          <a class="post-link" href="{{ post.url | relative_url }}">
          <h5 class="morebox">Read More...</h5>
        </a>
        </footer>
      </li>
    {%- endfor -%}

Others

Currently jekyll-paginate plugin doesn’t allow paging over groups of posts linked by a common tag or category. The more recent jekyll-paginate-v2 plugin can support the pagination for categories, tags and collections. See the pagination examples in the repository.