Hi adamfaily,
Did you made any code customization in the theme? If you customize the code in theme then while updating to new version all your customized code will be lost. So better make a child theme to avoid content loss while updating to new version.
Are you talking about the blog post? You can increase the number of blog post from dashboard -> settings -> Blog pages show at most (default 10)
Change default value 10 to some thing more like 50. Then it will display upto 50 post. Before 50 post your previous button will not appear. To do this you don’t need to create any child theme and while updating to new version your customized code will not be lost.
Thank you