How to add Easy WordPress Pagination without Plugins?

Are you a WordPress Theme Developer? Are you looking for an alternate option to WP-PageNavi?

It is definitely one of the most popular WordPress plugins and in fact, it is very useful. WordPress had a built-in function called paginate_links(), which can be used to create to paginate your blog without using any plugin?

Today, let’s see how to use this handy function to create a pagination for your WordPress blog.

global $wp_query;
$total = $wp_query->max_num_pages;
// only bother with the rest if we have more than 1 page!
if ( $total > 1 )  {
     // get the current page
     if ( !$current_page = get_query_var('paged') )
          $current_page = 1;
     // structure of "format" depends on whether we're using pretty permalinks
     $format = empty( get_option('permalink_structure') ) ? '&page=%#%' : 'page/%#%/';
     echo paginate_links(array(
          'base' => get_pagenum_link(1) . '%_%',
          'format' => $format,
          'current' => $current_page,
          'total' => $total,
          'mid_size' => 4,
          'type' => 'list'
     ));
}

Thanks to Smashing Magazine for nice tip on this.