Twenty-five exhibitions the site wouldn't show
An art gallery we work with got in touch to say their exhibitions page would not show more than twelve shows, and that the “View all” button underneath it went somewhere unexpected. Both were real, and the two had nothing to do with each other.
What we found
Thirty-seven exhibitions were published. Twelve were reachable. The limit was not Shopify’s, it was in the section that builds the page: the setting controlling how many posts appear had a maximum of twelve written into it, so the slider in the theme editor was pinned at the top of its range with nowhere to go. Twenty-five shows, years of the gallery’s own programme, were live and unreachable from the page built to list them. The store’s own sitemap was the quickest way to see it, thirty-seven articles against twelve tiles on screen.
The “View all” button was much simpler. Its link field had been filled in with one specific exhibition from 2023, so a button that should list everything went to a single show instead. The section already falls back to the full blog when that field is empty, so clearing it was the entire fix, in the theme editor, no code.
What we did
Rather than raise the number and leave it, we paginated the page properly. The gallery now picks how it behaves: a Load more button, infinite scroll, or numbered pages, with posts per page as a normal setting. Load more fetches the next page from Shopify and appends it, but underneath it is a real link to page two, so it still works if the script never runs. Infinite scroll keeps that button as the keyboard path rather than replacing it. And when someone clicks Load more, focus moves to the first new exhibition, because the button they just pressed gets replaced out from under them.
What to take from it
Content that has gone missing from a listing page is usually not missing at all, it is past a limit somebody set once and nobody has thought about since. If a page on your store stops at a suspiciously round number, twelve, twenty-five, sixty, that number is written down somewhere, and it is worth counting what you actually publish before you assume the platform is the ceiling.
