There will often be use cases where you decide to use your root directory to serve a static home page (e.g. app landing page) and then a different page to list your blog posts. Jekyll’s pagination plugin applies pagination to your root index.html by default and will spit warnings if you enabled it but no index.html file is found.

Let’s say your directory setup is as below:

_layouts
_includes
_posts
_config.yml
Gemfile
Gemfile.lock
blog.md
index.md
about.md

and you would like to paginate in blog.md.

1. Create a subdir named blog and move blog.md into it.
2. Rename blog.md to index.html.
3. In _config.yml, add the following line (assuming you already added paginate: page_num):

paginate_path: "/blog/page:num/"

That’s it! Simple as that. Now your pagination path will be

blog/
blog/page2
blog/page3

You can change page into something else you like. Full reference here.