Framer to Code: What Nobody Tells You About the Migration

The Framer Ceiling

Framer is the darling of the design world. It combines Figma-like design tools with real React components and butter-smooth animations. For a portfolio, a landing page, or a marketing site, it's genuinely excellent.

But Framer has a ceiling, and you'll hit it faster than you expect:

• No server-side logic. Need to process payments, send emails, query a database, or run any backend code? Framer can't do it. You're stuck with third-party integrations and webhook chains.
• Limited CMS. Framer's CMS works for blogs and simple collections. But try building a multi-level content hierarchy, content relationships, or programmatic content generation? You'll hit walls fast.
• Performance at scale. Framer sites are client-rendered React apps. For a 5-page site, that's fine. For a content-heavy site with 50+ pages, the bundle size and initial load time start to hurt.
• No code access. This is the fundamental issue. You don't own the code. You can't inspect it, version control it, or let AI tools modify it. Your site exists inside Framer's runtime, and it can't leave.

Sound familiar? It's the same story as Webflow, just wrapped in a prettier package.

What Makes Framer Migrations Different

Framer migrations are unique because Framer is already React under the hood. Your components, your layout system, your state management — conceptually, they map directly to a Next.js project. The design patterns are similar. The mental model is similar.

But 'similar' is the enemy of 'same'. And that gap is where all the migration pain lives.

The Component Problem

In Framer, components are defined visually. You set properties through the UI, configure variants with toggles, and wire up interactions with a timeline editor. The React code Framer generates is proprietary — it uses Framer Motion internals, Framer-specific props, and a rendering pipeline that doesn't exist outside Framer.

You can't export a Framer component and drop it into a Next.js project. You have to reconstruct each component. The design stays the same. The behavior stays the same. But the code is written from scratch.

The Animation Problem

This is the big one. Framer's signature feature is its animation system. Scroll-triggered animations, page transitions, micro-interactions, parallax effects — they all use Framer's proprietary animation engine.

The good news: Framer Motion (the open-source library) can replicate most of what Framer (the product) does. The bad news: translating visual animation timelines to code-based animation definitions is tedious, fiddly work. An animation that took 5 minutes to build in Framer's UI can take an hour to replicate in code.

For complex sites with heavy animation, this single issue can double the migration timeline.

The Design Token Problem

Framer stores your design system — colors, fonts, spacing, shadows — in its own format. There's no export button for your design tokens. You need to manually extract every value and recreate them as CSS variables or Tailwind config values.

It sounds trivial. It's not. A typical Framer site has 50-100 design tokens, and missing even one means your migrated site has subtle visual inconsistencies that take hours to track down.

The Migration Process

Step 1: Visual Inventory

Screenshot every page at every breakpoint. Document every animation, every hover state, every component variant. This is your reference specification. You'll compare against it constantly during development.

Step 2: Design System Extraction

Go through your Framer project and extract:

• Color palette (every shade, every opacity variation)
• Typography scale (font families, sizes, weights, line heights)
• Spacing system (margins, paddings, gaps)
• Border radius values
• Shadow definitions
• Breakpoints

Convert these into a Tailwind config or CSS custom properties. This is your design system, and everything builds on top of it.

Step 3: Component Architecture

Map each Framer component to a React component. Define props, variants, and behavior. Start with the simple ones (buttons, badges, text blocks) and build up to complex ones (navigation, hero sections, card grids).

This is where AI-assisted coding shines. Describe a component — "a card with an image on top, title, description, and a badge showing the category" — and Claude Code will generate it in seconds. You just need to apply your design tokens and fine-tune the details.

Step 4: Animation Recreation

Use Framer Motion (or CSS animations for simpler effects) to recreate your animations. Prioritize:

1. Page transitions (biggest visual impact)
1. Scroll-triggered entrance animations
1. Hover and interaction states
1. Loading states and skeleton screens

Skip the gratuitous animations. If an animation doesn't serve a purpose (guiding attention, providing feedback, creating continuity), drop it. Your site will load faster and feel more professional.

Step 5: CMS Migration

If you're using Framer's CMS, export your content (Framer allows CSV export for collections) and import it into Payload CMS, Sanity, or your headless CMS of choice. This is usually straightforward, since Framer CMS collections are simple.

Step 6: Integration Rewiring

Every third-party integration in Framer (forms, analytics, chat widgets) needs to be reconnected in your new stack. The approach is usually better in code — instead of embedding iframes and scripts, you use proper APIs and SDKs.

The Hard Truth About Timelines

A simple Framer site (5-10 pages, minimal CMS, basic animations): 1-2 weeks.

A complex Framer site (20+ pages, CMS collections, heavy animations, integrations): 3-5 weeks.

A Framer site with custom components and advanced interactions: 4-6 weeks.

The animation recreation alone can take 30-40% of the total migration time. If your Framer site is animation-heavy, budget accordingly.

Why It's Still Worth It

After migration, your site is:

• Fully AI-editable. Claude Code, Cursor, v0 — they all work with Next.js + Tailwind natively.
• Infinitely extensible. Need a backend? Add API routes. Need authentication? Add NextAuth. Need e-commerce? Add Stripe. No more integration gymnastics.
• Version controlled. Every change tracked in Git. Easy rollbacks. Branch-based previews.
• Faster. Server-rendered pages, optimized images, code-split bundles. Your Lighthouse score will thank you.

Framer got you from 0 to 1. Code gets you from 1 to 100.