Image weight is consistently one of the biggest levers in any website's performance budget, and Framer's default image handling leaves real room for improvement that a good export can capture.
What Framer does by default
Framer serves images through its own CDN with some automatic optimization — format negotiation and reasonable compression happen, so it's not that Framer ships raw, unoptimized files. But the defaults are generalized, not tuned per-image, and don't always pick the most aggressive reasonable format or size for a given placement.
What a thorough export actually improves
Re-encoding to WebP. Where source images are JPEG or PNG, converting to WebP at a well-chosen quality level typically cuts file size substantially with no visible quality loss for most photographic and UI imagery — this is usually the single biggest win available.
Right-sizing for actual display dimensions. If an image is uploaded at a much higher resolution than it's ever displayed at, serving the oversized original wastes bandwidth on every page load. A proper export should be pulling actual rendered dimensions and generating appropriately sized outputs rather than passing through whatever was originally uploaded.
Self-hosting instead of an external CDN dependency. Beyond the file size itself, serving images from your own domain instead of framerusercontent.com removes an external DNS/connection hop, which matters for Largest Contentful Paint — a Core Web Vital that directly factors into both user experience and search ranking.
What doesn't automatically improve
Re-encoding a poorly-composed or oversized source image (say, an unnecessarily huge hero photo where a smaller crop would've looked identical) doesn't fix the underlying content choice — that's still worth revisiting manually if you're optimizing seriously. Export tooling can only work with what's actually there.
How to verify it worked
Check a few image requests in dev tools' Network tab on your exported site — confirm the format is WebP (or another modern format) where it makes sense, the file sizes look reasonable for their displayed dimensions, and requests are coming from your own domain rather than Framer's CDN. A quick before/after Lighthouse comparison on the same page is the fastest way to see the aggregate impact.