When Framer is the right call — and when it is not
Framer earns its place on marketing sites: a launch that has to look considered, a product site that changes weekly, a campaign page nobody wants to file a developer ticket for. It is the wrong tool the moment you need a real store, gated member content, complex forms writing to your own database, or a plugin ecosystem to lean on. We will say so on the first call rather than after the deposit, because a Framer site that grows into something Framer cannot do is a rebuild, not an upgrade.
Building with components instead of pages
The difference between a Framer site that is cheap to change and one that is not is whether it was built out of components or out of pages that happen to look similar. Every repeated element — the pricing row, the logo strip, the testimonial block — becomes one component with properties, so a change lands everywhere at once. Sites assembled by copy-pasting frames look identical on launch day and cost three times as much to edit six months later.
The CMS is the part that decides how the site ages
Framer's CMS is genuinely good and genuinely opinionated. Collections, fields and relations have to be modelled before the design is locked, because restructuring a collection after there are two hundred entries in it is not a five-minute job. We map what the content actually is — what repeats, what relates to what, what your team will realistically keep updated — and build the collections to that, not to whatever the first page needed.
Interactions that do not cost you the page speed
Framer makes it trivial to add scroll effects, and trivial to add so many that the page stalls on a mid-range Android. Core Web Vitals are a ranking signal and a real measure of whether people wait. We budget the motion: what loads immediately, what is deferred, what is dropped entirely on a slow connection or when the visitor has asked for reduced motion. The site should feel expensive, not heavy.
SEO in Framer takes deliberate work
Framer will render fine for a crawler, but the things that actually move rankings are manual: per-page titles and descriptions, a sensible heading order, structured data, a real sitemap, canonicals on CMS-generated pages, and redirects for anything you are replacing. None of that is on by default. We set it up as part of the build, and if the site is replacing an existing one we produce a redirect map first rather than discovering the traffic loss afterwards.
Handing over a site your team can run
The point of Framer is that marketing can ship without a developer. That only happens if the components are named for what they do, the CMS fields are labelled in your language rather than ours, and someone walks your team through it. We hand over with a working session and a short written guide covering the things people actually get stuck on — publishing, adding a CMS entry, and what not to touch.
What a Framer build costs
Framer work is fixed-quoted from $300 AUD for a single page and runs to $12,000 AUD for a large multi-page site with CMS collections, custom components and integrations. Most marketing sites land between $2,500 and $5,500 AUD. Framer's own subscription is separate and paid directly to them. You get one number in writing before any work starts.
