How to Migrate from WordPress to Framer 

Is your WordPress website starting to feel slower, more complex, and harder to maintain than it should be? You’re not alone.

Although WordPress powers over 40% of websites worldwide, many businesses outgrow WordPress as their needs evolve. 

Plugin bloat, performance bottlenecks, ongoing maintenance, and security overhead push teams to explore modern alternatives.

As a result, more companies are migrating from WordPress to platforms like Shopify, Webflow, and, increasingly, Framer.

Framer offers a fundamentally different approach to website building, one that prioritizes speed, visual control, and simplicity. 

With built-in performance optimization, no plugin dependency, and a design-first workflow, Framer enables teams to build fast, scalable, and highly interactive websites without the traditional technical friction associated with WordPress.

In this guide, we’ll walk you through how to migrate from WordPress to Framer step by step without losing SEO, traffic, or site performance. You’ll learn how to prepare your existing site, export and restructure content, rebuild layouts in Framer, validate performance and SEO, and confidently launch your new website, without losing traffic, rankings, or functionality.

By the end, you’ll have a clear, practical roadmap for moving a website from WordPress to Framer safely and efficiently.

Let’s get started!

Why Choose Framer Instead of WordPress

Before learning how to migrate from WordPress to Framer, it’s important to understand why so many teams are making this shift and in which scenarios Framer is objectively the better choice.

While WordPress remains powerful and flexible, it was designed for a different era of the web, which is why many teams consider switching from WordPress to Framer. WordPress websites are often slow due to bloated code and multiple plugin installations, which puts significant stress on hosting servers.

Framer, in contrast, is built for modern performance, visual-first workflows, and low-maintenance scalability.  

Let's dive deeper into what makes Framer a no-brainer for most businesses!

Performance

WordPress websites are dynamically generated. Every page request typically pulls data from a database, processes PHP, and loads multiple plugins, themes, and third-party scripts. Over time, this architecture introduces latency, especially as sites grow.

Framer takes a different approach. It delivers pre-built, static pages optimized for modern hosting and CDN delivery. This results in:

• Faster page load times

• Lower Time to First Byte (TTFB)

• More consistent performance across devices

For teams prioritizing speed and Core Web Vitals, this architectural difference alone is a major reason to migrate from WordPress to Framer, which is why many teams consider switching from WordPress to Framer.

Design Freedom

WordPress and Framer approach design from fundamentally different perspectives.

WordPress is a content management system first. Design is typically implemented through themes, block systems, or page builders, with customization layered on through configuration, plugins, or custom development. 

This approach works well for structured content and editorial sites, but translating a design vision into the final product often requires multiple tools, iterations, and technical adjustments.

Framer, on the other hand, is design-native, which simplifies the process when rebuilding a WordPress site in Framer. It treats layout, responsiveness, and interaction as first-class elements of the building process. 

The experience is closer to working in a design tool like Figma, where:

• Layouts are visually composed rather than configured

• Responsive behavior is defined directly on the canvas

• Components are designed and reused without abstraction layers

• Animations and interactions are built into the core workflow

This difference does not make WordPress less capable; it makes Framer more direct for teams that prioritize design precision, speed of iteration, and visual consistency between design and production.

For marketing sites, landing pages, product pages, and brand-driven experiences, this design-first workflow reduces complexity and accelerates delivery.

Maintenance & Security

WordPress requires constant maintenance. Most WordPress sites rely on multiple plugins and third-party tools to meet performance, SEO, security, and functionality requirements. As a result, updates are frequent and usually include core updates, theme updates, plugin updates, and security patches.

The challenge of these constant updates is that any update can unexpectedly break your site, leading to performance issues, layout problems, or downtime.

Framer functions differently, which is a key reason businesses migrate from WordPress to Framer to reduce maintenance overhead. There are no servers or plugins to maintain. 

Framer handles hosting, performance, and security at the platform level; teams spend far less time on updates, monitoring, and maintenance. 

By moving away from a plugin-heavy setup like WordPress, you also reduce plugin vulnerabilities by switching to Framer. 

Workflow Efficiency

In WordPress, designers and developers often operate in separate workflows. Designs are created in one tool and rebuilt in another, which leads to miscommunication, multiple revisions, and slow handoffs.

Framer brings everyone into a single visual environment. Designers, marketers, and developers work on the same canvas and see changes in real time.

This shared workflow reduces friction and speeds up iteration, which eventually leads to an easier launch from the idea stage.

Built-in SEO Advantage

WordPress depends heavily on plugins for SEO, which adds complexity during a WordPress to Framer migration. 

Framer has a more built-in approach. It includes several SEO-friendly features by default, such as:

• Fast page load speeds

• Automatic image optimization

• Built-in sitemaps and metadata controls

These features give Framer SEO advantages for organic growth after migrating from WordPress to Framer.

Large e-commerce stores, massive blogs, and sites requiring heavy backend logic may still be better suited for WordPress. These sites typically need advanced data handling and deep integrations that WordPress’s mature ecosystem supports well

But for most marketing sites, landing pages, startup websites, and modern brands, Framer is a no-brainer. It delivers a smarter and more efficient foundation for long-term growth.

Now that we’ve gotten our foundation solidified, let’s dive deeper into the step-by-step guidelines on how to migrate from WordPress to Framer easily and effectively.

This guide explains how to migrate from WordPress to Framer step-by-step. It focuses on protecting SEO and site stability during the migration, so pages don’t break and rankings aren’t lost. 

This is the ultimate guide for SaaS founders, marketing websites, and brand sites looking to move from WordPress to Framer.

Step 1: Save a Full Backup

You should save a full copy of the website before making any changes.

Create a full backup of your WordPress site. You should have backups of your database, your media library, your theme, and a complete XML export of your posts and pages.

If something goes wrong:

• Content missing

• Pages broken

• Images lost

You can always go back.

This backup will be your undo button for the whole WordPress to Framer migration process.

Step 2: Clean Up Before Migration

Before your WordPress to Framer migration, clean up your WordPress site

• Remove old pages you no longer need.

• Delete spam comments, unused drafts, and outdated content.

• Uninstall the old plugins that you no longer use.

This will keep your export small and clean. It will also reduce the chance of errors when you import everything into Framer.

Step 3: Save a Clean Backup of the Website

After cleaning up, create a second export of your website.

This export is the version you’ll actually migrate to Framer. Because unused content is already removed, this file is smaller, clearer, and easier to work with.

Step 4: Preparing Your Migration

The goal of this step is to list every item that needs to be migrated after creating a clean backup, so nothing important is overlooked.

This list should consist of: 

• The pages on your site

• The content on those pages

• The images and files currently in use

• The plugins your site relies on 

This will be your checklist during the migration stage to ensure nothing important is missed.

If any key elements are missed in this stage, you will face issues after the migration. Your page might be missing, content might be broken, or worse, your site’s search ranking will drop. 

A rushed pre-migration process is the #1 cause of SEO disasters when moving a site from WordPress to Framer.

Step 5: How Plugins Work in Framer 

After listing down everything, you have to focus on your plugins. WordPress websites often rely on plugins to add features such as contact forms, SEO tools, and e-commerce functionality.

These plugins do not move to Framer after the migration, which is an important factor when planning a WordPress to Framer migration.

That means you have to understand what your website’s plugins were doing for you and rebuild the necessary plugins using Framer’s native capabilities or simple third-party integrations

By moving away from a plugin-heavy structure, your site becomes easier to manage and no longer depends on constant plugin updates.

Step 6: Rebuild Your Main Pages in Framer

After all that preparation, you can begin rebuilding your WordPress site in Framer. In this step, you have to rebuild the most important pages for your Framer site.

• Home

• About

• Blog

• Services

• Contact

These pages will help the visitors understand who you are and what type of product you offer. That’s why these pages need to be rebuilt first.

Officially, Framer says that there are two common ways to migrate from WordPress to Framer.

The first is a manual rebuild. You recreate each page directly inside Framer by visually copying over content and rebuilding the layout. This approach gives you full control of building up cleaner-looking pages.

The second is a semi-manual approach. You can use the WordPress to Framer Chrome extension and import existing page sections directly. After you’ve got your elements in your Framer project, you can easily make it responsive. But here, you often need to do cleanup and adjustments to make the page work properly with Framer’s layout and responsiveness.

In this stage, you don’t need the perfect design; the priority is ensuring your WordPress to Framer website migration is structurally sound.

The main goal of this stage is to make sure your pages exist, work, and are easy to understand.

Step 7: Migrate your Images and Files

After building the main pages, you have to move media files. These files need to be brought separately.

Firstly, you have to identify the images you will use in your Framer website. Then you have to download those images from your WordPress media Library.

Once downloaded, optimize the images before uploading them to Framer. Smaller, lighter images help your pages load faster and improve the overall experience.

If images are moved without optimization, pages can load slowly or break entirely, especially on mobile devices.

For videos, avoid uploading them directly to Framer. Instead, upload your videos to platforms like YouTube and embed them using a link. 

These steps will help to load your page faster. Many smartphone users get frustrated over the load time of your website.

Step 8: Migrate your Blog Posts

The main goal of this step is to preserve URL structure, content, and metadata so your WordPress to Framer SEO migration does not impact rankings or traffic.

A blog post brings traffic from Google, so you have to be extremely careful when migrating a WordPress blog to Framer.

When blog content is moved carelessly, post links can change, pages may fall out of search results, and new versions may take longer to be recognized and shown in search result by Google.

When moving blogs from WordPress to Framer, blog posts are first exported from WordPress as an XML file. You need to convert this file to a CSV, which Framer uses to import blog posts into its CMS.

Step 9: Make Sure Old Links Work

This step ensures that visitors and search engines can reach your page after migration to Framer. 

At this point of migration, you have a list of all the pages you have in the WordPress site. You have to manually check all the links to see if they’re taking the user to the appropriate page on your Framer site.

If you see broken links or missing pages, simply change the link URL slug, redirect to the desired page, or remove the link altogether. 

Focus especially on:

• Blog posts

• High traffic pages

• Important landing pages

Also, try to keep URL slugs consistent or use proper redirects, which is critical for Framer SEO when moving from WordPress to Framer.

Step 10: Testing Your New Framer Site Before Launch

The goal of this step is to make sure everything works correctly across devices before going live.

Firstly, review your layouts on desktop, tablet, and mobile. Check spacing, alignment, and typography in the site to confirm your responsive structure is behaving correctly.

Later, test the menus, buttons, and internal links to make sure every page is connected and working. 

Check if the interactive elements, like form or expandable sections, work or not. If we have successfully migrated WordPress shortcodes to Framer or not. These features are replacing your old plug-in-based setup in WordPress.

Finally, run a quick performance test to check if the loading time is okay and the page is smooth or not. 

Step 11: Launching Your Framer Website

In this phase, you finally make your move.

When everything in your post-migration checklist looks in order,  that's the green light to publish your page.

For the next few weeks, monitor your site closely. Watch your traffic, your rankings, and your crawl reports. If you see errors, fix them early.

A smooth migration depends on early monitoring.

Common WordPress To Framer Migration Mistakes

Migration from WordPress to Framer can go smoothly if some common mistakes can be avoided.

One of the most common mistakes is starting the migration without proper preparation. When pages, content, or media aren’t clearly reviewed beforehand, things often go missing after the move.

Another mistake is assuming that WordPress plugins will transfer automatically. Plugins don’t move to Framer, so the features they provided need to be rebuilt. If those features aren’t recreated, parts of the site may not work as expected.

Blog migration is also where teams rush and make a mistake. Blog posts carry SEO value, and skipping careful exports, formatting, or URL consistency can lead to lost traffic. This step works best when done slowly and reviewed carefully.

Image handling is often overlooked. Moving large, unoptimized images from WordPress to Framer can slow down page load times, especially on smartphones. Optimizing images before uploading helps keep the site fast.

To avoid these mistakes, you do not need to be technically savvy. You just need to be careful while conducting these steps so that you don’t forget any of these steps.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Is Framer better than WordPress for business websites?

For most modern marketing-focused websites, Framer is often a better choice than WordPress. Framer offers faster performance, fewer maintenance issues, and more design flexibility. 

WordPress remains better suited for complex backend-driven sites like large e-commerce stores or data-heavy platforms.

How long does it take to migrate from WordPress to Framer?

The timeline depends on the size and complexity of your site. 

A small site may take a few days, while sites with large blogs, custom layouts, and SEO history may take several weeks to migrate carefully.

How is a design subscription different from hiring freelancers or agencies?

Subscriptions offer predictable pricing, unlimited requests, and continuous availability, while freelancers juggle clients and agencies rely on long timelines.

Many teams choose subscriptions for consistency, speed, and daily progress.

What happens to WordPress plugins when you migrate to Framer?

No, WordPress plugins do not move to Framer. 

Instead of plugins, Framer relies on built-in features and simple integrations. This helps reduce plugin vulnerabilities and long-term maintenance issues.

Is Framer secure compared to WordPress?

Yes. Framer offers strong security benefits compared to WordPress because it doesn’t rely on third-party plugins or self-managed servers. This significantly reduces the risk of plugin-related vulnerabilities.

Is ongoing maintenance easier in Framer than WordPress?

Yes. Framer generally requires far less ongoing maintenance because it doesn’t rely on plugins or manual server updates. This makes long-term site management simpler and more predictable.

Is This Something You Can Do Yourself?

You can migrate from WordPress to Framer on your own, but it depends on how your WordPress site was built. If your site is comparatively simple, you don’t rely on plugins, you can do this migration on your own.

If your website has a large blog, a custom layout, a plug-in-based feature, and a long history of SEO work, then the migration process is complex. The migration requires careful handling to avoid broken pages and a drop in search rankings.

So yes, you can do it yourself.
But can you do it efficiently?

If you want to move fast, protect your SEO, and avoid costly mistakes, working with experts who specialize in WordPress to Framer migration services can make the process significantly easier.

Hiring a freelancer for this kind of work is not practical. Freelancers usually help once and then move on, so for every new fix, you need to hire that freelancer over and over again.

Asking a full-time team member to handle all of this isn’t easy either, because it adds extra work on top of their main job. Traditional agencies usually work the same way; they finish the project and leave, even though websites need ongoing care.

This is where a design subscription agency like Rubik fits in. Instead of helping once and leaving, Rubik handles the migration and the ongoing improvements under one subscription, so you don’t have to keep finding and paying different people again and again.

Instead of hiring someone for a single task or making your internal team do the extra work, a design subscription agency keeps helping you whenever you need any change.