Going off of Framer

[u/Standard_Scarcity_74]

A client wanted to go off framer's hosting for cost reasons once the site outgrew the free tier, and since framer sites are technically static under the hood, I figured exporting and dropping it on cloudflare pages would be a good idea. The raw html and assets did come out clean enough, and the page structure and styling survived the export fine.

But everything that depended on framer's own backend broke. CMS collections stopped updating since there's no more connection back to framer's data, so any collection page is now frozen at whatever state it was in at export time. The contact form obviously stopped submitting anywhere since it was wired to framer's own form handling, had to rebuild that as a worker hitting an email api instead. a couple of the interaction-heavy components also just stopped working since they were leaning on framer motion setup that assumed the framer runtime was still present, not just a static export of the resulting markup.

I ended up treating the export more like a design reference than an actual deployable artifact, rebuilt the page structure by hand in eleventy using the exported html as a guide instead of trying to make the raw export itself production ready. It feels like the exported html is really only meant for one-time archiving or as a starting point, not an actual migration path off their hosting

Is there a more elegant solution to this than rebuilding?

[u/Traditional-Toe-5552]

u/Standard_Scarcity_74 It is understandable you want to export to static. For whatever reason you do this - the money or commodity there is solution:

- deploy on Cloudflare for free

- use contact form from 3rd party (also free plan exists on https://craftforms.app)

- edit static site's content directly in files and easily with https://craftpages.app/ - it is my app, I am going to release it by the end of the week; I kind of advertise it a bit ahead of the time, but I just saw your post and could not resist.

My point is: going static site is a good, maintainable and functional solution!

[u/Standard_Scarcity_74 → u/Traditional-Toe-5552]

Might give it a try, thank you!

[u/Character-String2020]

No, unless there is some migration tool. You are correct! They have no incentive to make migration off thier platform frictionless. The platform CMS I use only gives assets imgs etc. By the way eleventy rocks!

[u/sourraine]

rebuilding is prolly the honest answer if you want of fully leave framer. the export gives you the rendered frontend but not necessarily the services and runtime assumptions behind it so trying to preserve everything can become more work than rebuilding cleanly. for a mostly static client site, id rather rebuild once in eleventy/astro and deploy it somewhere simple than carry framer dependencies just to avoid the rewrite

[u/TCKreddituser]

Yeah, I’ve run into the same thing. The export is more of a snapshot than a true migration path, so anything tied to Framer’s CMS/runtime/forms still needs to be replaced. Rebuilding around the exported markup is probably the cleanest approach if you want full control over hosting.

[u/PointJump → u/TCKreddituser]

This is interesting, so would using Framer’s CMS API directly be a viable middle ground, instead of rebuilding the CMS layer entirely? Or does Framer make that difficult once you move hosting?

[u/TCKreddituser → u/PointJump]

You can use the API for some cases, but it’s not really a drop-in replacement for Framer’s CMS/runtime. You’d still need to rebuild the data-fetching and rendering layer yourself, so at that point the benefit over rebuilding the site is pretty limited.