Pagination Design – Pull all Data at once?

Hey everyone.

I'm working on enabling pagination for my frontend to pull data from my backend. At the moment, it's set up to pull data incrementally, depending on the page. This seems straight forward.

However, most customer facing sites, show every page available & the total. How does this work?

Do you have your backend pull all the data at once, cache it on the frontend, and pagination is simply a frontend user experience improvement?