Answer
Pages 6 and later are not being generated because the pagination you are using does not honor max_pages and is likely limited by plugin and host constraints. With paginate: 10 and 100 posts you expect 10 pages, but jekyll-paginate v1 does not support max_pages and GitHub Pages will only run the whitelisted v1 plugin.
Confirmed facts
- Jekyll core has no built-in pagination. Pagination is provided by a plugin.
jekyll-paginate v1, the plugin allowed on GitHub Pages, paginates only the posts index with paginate and paginate_path in _config.yml. It does not support collection pagination, custom pagination paths, or max_pages.max_pages is a configuration key of jekyll-paginate-v2. It is ignored by jekyll-paginate v1.- Jekyll 4.2.2 works with both plugins when self-hosted, but the available features depend on which gem is declared in the Gemfile and where the site is built.
Likely explanation for the hard stop at page 5
The stop at page 5 is most plausibly a plugin-host mismatch or a theme navigation limit, not a content volume limit.
- If the site is built on GitHub Pages, only
jekyll-paginate v1 runs. The max_pages key is present in _config.yml but is silently ignored, and pages beyond what the theme links to appear missing.
- If the site is self-hosted but the Gemfile still declares
jekyll-paginate v1, max_pages will be ignored and the paginator object will still expose total_pages based on paginate alone.
- A pagination partial can hard-code a visible window or a maximum page number, giving the appearance that later pages are missing even when they are generated in
_site.
Verification steps for this case
- Confirm the active plugin and host.
grep -E "jekyll-paginate" Gemfile
cat _config.yml | grep -E "paginate|plugins"
- Build locally and inspect output.
bundle exec jekyll build
ls -1 _site/page
If 6, 7 etc. are missing, the plugin did not generate them.
- Inspect the paginator in the index layout.
{{ paginator.total_pages }} {{ paginator.page }}
Render locally to see the reported total.
To generate all ten pages you need a plugin-host combination that supports it. On GitHub Pages you are limited to jekyll-paginate v1 with posts-only pagination and no max_pages. Self-hosted sites can use jekyll-paginate-v2 with a different config schema for collections and max_pages. Changing paginate_path after pages exist can orphan URLs.
One diagnostic detail changes the recommendation: are you building on GitHub Pages or self-hosted, and which gem is listed in Gemfile, jekyll-paginate or jekyll-paginate-v2?
jekyll