No hosting platform has perfect uptime, Framer included — worth thinking through what an outage actually means for a site you don't control the infrastructure for, before it happens rather than during.
The dependency you're accepting by staying fully on Framer
When your site is published and hosted entirely on Framer, its availability is entirely tied to Framer's infrastructure being up. That's not a criticism specific to Framer — it's true of every fully-hosted platform (Webflow, Squarespace, Shopify, all of them) — but it's worth being clear-eyed about: a platform-wide incident on their end takes your site down too, and there's nothing you can do from your side to mitigate it in the moment.
Why this matters more for some sites than others
A personal portfolio being briefly unreachable during an outage is a minor inconvenience. A business's primary marketing site, a time-sensitive campaign landing page, or anything with real revenue or reputation riding on uptime is a different risk calculus — and one worth actively managing rather than just hoping doesn't happen.
How an exported backup actually changes this
Having a periodically-updated, exported copy of your site — even if you're not actively using it as your primary hosting — means you're never more than a quick deploy away from having something live if your primary platform has an extended outage. This doesn't have to mean running dual infrastructure permanently; it can be as simple as: export a current copy, keep it somewhere ready to deploy (a GitHub repo, a Vercel project you're not actively pointing your domain at), and you have a genuine fallback plan rather than just waiting out someone else's incident with no options.
A practical backup cadence
- After any significant content or design update, export a fresh copy
- At minimum, export periodically (monthly, for an actively-maintained site) even without a specific trigger
- Keep the exported copies somewhere durable — a Git repository is a natural fit, since it also gives you version history for free
This is the same logic as any other business continuity practice — you don't maintain backups because you expect disaster, you maintain them because the cost of having one is low and the cost of needing one without having it is high.