Moving a site to your own domain and hosting is not inherently risky to SEO. What loses rankings is the small stuff that's easy to get wrong during the move — changed URLs, dropped canonical tags, missing redirects. Get those right and a migration is usually neutral-to-positive. Get them wrong and you can shed months of ranking equity overnight.
1. Keep every URL exactly the same
The single biggest ranking killer in any migration is changing paths. If /work/project-name on the old site becomes /projects/project-name on the new one, every link, every indexed page, and every bit of accumulated authority pointing at the old URL now points at a 404. Preserve the exact path structure, including nested routes and trailing-slash behavior. A good conversion mirrors the original URL structure automatically — verify it did before you switch DNS.
2. Repoint canonical tags to the new domain
Framer sites ship <link rel="canonical"> tags pointing at the Framer-hosted URL. If those survive the move unchanged, you're telling Google that the old Framer URL is the authoritative version of each page — actively suppressing your new domain in its own search results. Every canonical needs to be rewritten to the new domain during conversion.
3. Set up 301 redirects if the domain actually changes
If you're moving from yoursite.framer.website to yoursite.com, add 301 (permanent) redirects from the old domain to the new one. A 301 passes the large majority of ranking signal to the destination; a 302 (temporary) or no redirect at all passes little or none. If you're keeping the same custom domain and only changing where it's hosted, you don't need redirects at all — the URLs never changed.
4. Don't lose your metadata in the move
Titles, meta descriptions, Open Graph tags, and structured data are ranking and click-through inputs. A conversion that captures the rendered HTML preserves these; a rebuild-from-scratch often silently drops them. Check that your top pages still have their original titles and descriptions after conversion.
5. Verify before and after
Before switching, crawl the converted site and confirm: every important URL resolves, canonicals point to the new domain, and titles/descriptions survived. After switching, submit the new sitemap in Google Search Console and watch the coverage report for a week. Rankings can wobble for a few days during re-crawl — that's normal and recovers.
The short version
The converter side of this — mirroring URLs, repointing canonicals, preserving metadata, generating a sitemap — should be automatic. Our Framer-to-Next.js and HTML converters handle all four during conversion. The DNS and redirect side is yours to set up, and it's the part worth double-checking by hand. If you want a fuller walkthrough of the hosting move itself, see our guide to self-hosting a Framer site.