How to Refine a Framer-to-Next.js Export with Cursor or Claude Code

A Next.js export from this tool splits each page into named React components — Hero.tsx, Pricing.tsx, Footer.tsx, named after the sections in your Framer project — that still render the original DOM exactly, with Framer's runtime kept (it loads from Framer's CDN, so the Framer project stays published). The components are faithful, not rewritten. That's a deliberate tradeoff, not a limitation we're hiding, and it's worth explaining plainly so you know exactly what you're getting and what a good next step looks like.

Why the components aren't rewritten

Framer's runtime — its animation engine, hover states, appear effects — depends on specific HTML structure, including comment nodes React has no syntax to emit. We tried decomposing captured pages into clean, separate JSX components once. It looked right structurally and broke Framer's hydration in a way that only showed up as a real, measured regression (mobile Performance dropped from 94 to 62) — because losing those comment nodes forces Framer's runtime into a slow client-side re-render instead of hydrating instantly. So the export draws component boundaries at your Framer sections but keeps the markup inside each one exactly as Framer rendered it: the components render back to the original DOM, comment nodes included, so animations and interactions behave exactly as on Framer. Fidelity and clean, rewritten JSX are in tension here, and we chose fidelity.

Because each component is named after its Framer section, you're not opening a completely unlabeled wall of markup — the file names are the map. But inside each file the markup is Framer's, not a rewrite.

Where an AI coding assistant actually helps

This is the honest, practical next step once you have working, deployed code: point Cursor or Claude Code at the generated project and ask it to refine specific, standalone section components — a pricing table, a testimonials section, a footer — into idiomatic React, one at a time. Two things make this safe in a way that rewriting the whole page at once isn't:

• You (or the assistant) can verify each change visually before moving to the next one, instead of committing to a full-page transform in one shot.
• You're not obligated to touch the animation-heavy sections at all. Leave the parts that depend on Framer's hydration timing exactly as they are, and only refine the static, content-only components — the ones with no runtime dependency to break.

A reasonable prompt to hand Claude Code or Cursor once the project's deployed and working:

"The testimonials section is its own component — find the file named after it, such as Testimonials.tsx. Refactor it into idiomatic React (for example, map the repeated cards from an array), but keep the rendered markup and classes exactly the same so the page still looks identical. Don't touch any other component."

Asking it to keep the rendered output identical is the important part — the same lesson as the fidelity tradeoff above, just applied at a smaller, safer scale.

What not to ask an assistant to do

Don't ask it to "rewrite this page as clean React components" in one pass — that's the exact transform we already tried and measured breaking. Piecemeal, verified refinement of static section components is the version of "clean editable code" that's actually achievable without giving up fidelity; a full-page rewrite in one shot is the version that isn't, for the same structural reason it wasn't safe for us to automate.

The realistic workflow

1. Convert with the Next.js export — get a real, deployable project, split into named section components, with fidelity intact.
2. Deploy it and confirm it looks and behaves exactly like the original.
3. Use an AI coding assistant to refine specific static section components, one at a time, verifying each one.
4. Leave the animation-dependent sections as-is unless you're deliberately trading fidelity for cleaner code in that one spot.

This is the same "design in Framer, convert, refine with an AI coding assistant" pipeline a lot of people already reach for — we're just being explicit about which part of that pipeline this tool does (step 2, faithfully) and which part is genuinely better handled by you and an assistant working section by section (step 3), rather than pretending the section components we hand you are already hand-refined.