Not everyone exporting a Framer site is trying to leave — some just want it faster, and there's genuine room to improve performance without touching hosting at all.
Start with a real measurement
Before changing anything, run your live URL through PageSpeed Insights or Lighthouse directly. Guessing at what's slow wastes effort; the report tells you exactly which resource or metric is actually the bottleneck for your specific page.
The levers that are actually inside your control
Image sizing and format. Upload images at the resolution they'll actually render at, not your camera's native size — Framer doesn't always aggressively downscale for you. Where possible, favor formats Framer will serve efficiently, and avoid dropping in unnecessarily large source files "just in case."
Font choices. Every additional font family and weight is a separate network request before text can render in that style. Audit your type scale — it's common to find 2–3 weights of a family in use when one or two would do the same job visually.
Animation and interaction density. Every appear animation, scroll effect, and interactive component adds runtime work. This doesn't mean cut all motion — it means being deliberate: a hero section with five simultaneously-animating elements is doing five times the layout/paint work of one with a single focal animation.
Page structure. Long single pages with everything loaded up front will always be heavier than the same content split across routes, if your content genuinely supports being split.
Third-party embeds. Every embedded widget (chat, video, forms from another provider) adds its own JS payload on top of Framer's own runtime. Audit what's actually earning its weight.
What Framer's platform overhead means you can't fix from inside the editor
The core JS runtime itself — the code that makes the visual editor and Framer's interaction system work — ships regardless of how lean your content is. That's a fixed cost of staying on Framer's platform, not something editor-level optimization removes. If you've done everything above and Performance is still capped lower than you'd like, that ceiling is coming from the runtime itself, not your content choices — and the only way past it is not shipping that runtime to visitors at all, which is what a runtime-stripped static export does.
Whether that tradeoff (leaving the editor's live-editing convenience behind) is worth it depends entirely on how much the remaining performance gap actually matters for your specific site.