Infinite scroll vs load-more vs real pagination

Infinite scroll vs load-more vs real pagination
Client's category had infinite scroll. Google crawled the first 12 products and stopped. The other 300 were invisible.
— Infinite scroll: pure JS, no crawlable URLs for deeper items. SEO death for big catalogs unless paired with paginated fallback URLs.
— Load-more button: same problem if it's JS-only, but easy to back with ?page=2 URLs.
— Real pagination: ugly-ish UX, but every page is a crawlable, indexable URL. Bulletproof for discovery.
The move: I give users infinite scroll OR load-more for feel, but wire real ?page=N URLs underneath that bots can follow.
Test it the bot way — disable JS, view source. If you can't click to page 2, neither can Googlebot. Everything past the fold is orphaned.