There's a common assumption that converting a Framer site to Next.js automatically makes it faster. We wanted an honest answer, not a marketing one, so we picked 10 real, published Framer portfolio templates — Fuel, Portfolite, Palmer, LaunchFolio, Kirk, MakOS, Miles, Portavia, Artemis, and Meeko — and ran mobile Lighthouse on both the original and a fidelity-preserving Next.js conversion of each.
The result, unfiltered
Across all 10 templates, average mobile Performance went from 82.1 (original) to 69.8 (converted) — a real, measurable drop, not an improvement. Accessibility went the other direction: 91.3 → 94.9, improving on every single template. SEO matched exactly. Best Practices dipped slightly, traced to a separate, fixable bug (below).
One template — MakOS — actually beat its original: 85 → 98. The rest ranged from a small dip to a serious one (Fuel: 99 → 67).
Why performance doesn't automatically improve
A conversion that keeps a site's exact runtime, animations, and interactivity intact (what we call a fidelity-preserving or "pure" export) is, by definition, still running that same JavaScript runtime — Framer's own bundled Motion/appear-animation engine, hover-state machinery, breakpoint system. Converting the hosting doesn't remove that weight. If a site was JS-heavy or image-heavy on Framer, it's still JS-heavy or image-heavy after conversion, just running from a different server.
The templates that dropped hardest were also the ones with the heaviest video/image payloads on the original — the conversion process doesn't and shouldn't silently degrade those assets, so the weight carries over.
What genuinely does improve, and why
Accessibility improved on 10/10 templates because Framer's own export consistently ships four fixable gaps regardless of the source site: no lang attribute on <html>, iframe embeds with no title, no main landmark, and icon-only logo/social links with zero accessible name. These are structural gaps in how Framer generates markup, not something any individual site's designer did wrong — and they're mechanically fixable during conversion, which is why every single template we tested improved here.
If you actually want a faster site, not just a different host
Fidelity-preserving conversion optimizes for "renders identically to the original." A separate conversion mode that strips the runtime entirely and rebuilds the page as lean static HTML is a fundamentally different tradeoff — real, large performance gains (we've measured single-page jumps from the mid-30s to the low 80s), at the cost of losing Framer's native JS-driven interactivity. Which one is right depends entirely on whether pixel-perfect fidelity or maximum Lighthouse score matters more for a given site — see our comparison of Hybrid HTML vs Pure Next.js export for the practical tradeoffs.
If you want to check where your own site lands, convert it and compare the real PageSpeed numbers before deciding which mode fits.