Pagination vs Infinite Scroll. Which is better for SEO?

I have a page displaying a list of bloggers. Each card contains:

• Name
• Bio
• Social media links
• Iframe video (lazy-loaded)

The page has 50–100 cards total.

I'm trying to decide between two approaches:
1) Pagination: show 20 cards per page with page navigation
2) Infinite scroll: load more cards as the user scrolls down

My main concerns:

• SEO: Which approach is better for search engine indexing?
• Performance: Given the iframe videos (even with lazy loading), which option handles better?
• UX: Any considerations I might be missing?

The videos are already lazy loaded, but I'm still worried about DOM size and overall page performance with 50-100 iframes potentially in the DOM.

What would you recommend and why?

I’m personally not a fan of infinite scroll and always go for pagination.

For SEO, traditional pagination is usually safer because it creates crawlable, indexable URLs for each page. Infinite scroll can work if properly implemented with history and “load more” links, but big DOMs with many iframes can hurt performance. Pagination also gives users clear navigation and faster initial load. With 50–100 videos, keeping the DOM light with pagination is usually the better choice.

Pagination isn't just about scanning. Infinite scrolling looks great, but google often simply can't find the content within it. Even if everything is technically correct, without clear paginated urls, search engines don't understand the depth of the site.
In your case, with 50-100 cards and iframes, this is even more important. Even with lazy loading, one large dom slows down the page, which affects how Google processes it. The best solution that actually works is pagination as a foundation, with a load more button on top for user convenience. But the button should be backed by actual page urls, not just content loading into the dom

Pagination is better for SEO and performance, infinite scroll can hurt indexing and make page heavy with many iframes.

Pagination is generally better for SEO since search engines can crawl all pages easily. Infinite scroll can work but needs extra indexing setup. With many iframes, pagination also helps performance.

Stick entirely with standard pagination. Googlebot notoriously struggles to execute JavaScript infinite scrolls, meaning your deeper cards will simply become orphaned content. Plus, shoving 100 iframes into a single DOM, even if they are heavily lazy-loaded, is going to completely annihilate your Core Web Vitals and crash mobile browsers.

i think best option is pagination for your case, because for seo google can easily crawl and index pages when content is split with proper links, infinite scroll sometimes miss content if not implemented perfectly. also performance wise pagination is better because only 20 cards load at once so less dom and less iframe load, infinite scroll can make page heavy after some scroll even with lazy load. for ux you can mix both like pagination + load more button so user also feel smooth. overall pagination is safe and better for seo and performance.