How deep to make categories

[BobGW]

Hello,

We've got about 400 products in about 30 categories (not including subcategories). There's a lot of subcategories and a lot of overlap. A few categories have 80 products in them, most have around 10-20, and some have five or six.

Would it be best to not use pagination? We'd like to put all products in a subcategory on one page, but we're worried about page load speed.

Your thoughts?

[JessicaDunbar]

I’m a fan of how apple organizes their products.  80 products in a category, shouldn't give you a problem with too many on page links.

If you have subcategory overlap, make sure you have canonicalization to avoid duplicate content.

If you need to paginate put the most important products first

Here's an article about optimizing your page speed