Pagination and WP_Query

Hello!

This is an issue regarding pagination using WP_Query on a Static front page that is not the index.php template!

I’m currently dealing with a bit of an issue with one of my clients. They’ve been running a premium theme that includes the WP Visual Composer (I believe it’s by WPBakery?)

Anyways, I have a custom component for this composer that just outputs posts on a static front page, and I’m trying to figure out how to enable paging. I recall getting this to work before, but I’m at a loss currently.

The site I help manage is https://pixelkin.org

You’ll notice that the pagination is broken. clicking a number or the ‘next’ button will bring you to ‘pixelkin.org/page/# but then will immediately reload the first page.

Here’s my rendering code for the visual composer

I can render the posts just fine, but at the end I append the output for pagination through a ‘home_pagination’ function, which is right here

I’ve been fiddling with this for about two hours and I’m just… stuck. Especially when I’ve seen this working before.

I’ve tried messing around with swapping the ‘page’ and ‘paged’ variables, but to no avail.

Is there something I’m missing? this only recently happened, I’ve disabled all plugins since that update and checked into SEO plugins that might do URL rewrites, but I was hoping to reach out and see if anyone else sees something that I don’t.