Most Framer-to-HTML exports lose hover effects, and it's not a bug in the exporter — it's a structural property of how Framer builds them in the first place.
The short answer
Framer doesn't implement hover states with CSS :hover rules the way a hand-coded site would. Instead, its runtime attaches JavaScript event listeners to elements and computes style changes on the fly — reading the "before" computed style, the "after" state defined in the component variant, and animating between them with a spring or tween. None of that logic lives in the page's static HTML or CSS. It only exists inside Framer's minified JS bundle, which a static export strips out (correctly — that bundle also pulls in Framer's CDN dependency, analytics, and hundreds of KB of runtime weight you're trying to get rid of).
So when a converter promises "pixel-perfect HTML export," and the hover states go dead, that's the tradeoff surfacing: no runtime, no runtime-computed behavior.
What we found reverse-engineering it
We went looking for exactly how much of this is really recoverable. Inspecting a real Framer site's DOM under an active hover, the pattern is consistent: Framer stacks a "Main" text/icon layer and a "Hover" layer in the same component, and on hover it animates a transform (commonly a translateY) to swap which one is visually in view — sometimes with a spring, sometimes a tween, always driven by JS, never by a CSS transition. We checked systematically: across a real site's hover interactions, zero of them had an actual CSS transition-duration captured — confirming this is JS/spring-driven, not CSS-driven, effectively everywhere.
What actually works
Two honest options, depending on what "export" means to you:
- Keep Framer's runtime intact. If the export wraps and serves the original page (assets on Framer's CDN, JS bundle untouched), every hover effect works exactly as authored — because it's genuinely the same code running. The tradeoff is you're not fully independent of Framer's CDN.
- Reconstruct hover behavior from captured runtime data. A tool that actually drives the live site in a real browser, hovers every interactive element, and records the exact computed style delta (not just the static HTML) can rebuild real CSS
:hoverrules with the true before/after values — closer to the original than guessing, but still an approximation of spring physics with CSS easing.
What doesn't work: parsing the static HTML/CSS alone. There's nothing there to recover — the data legitimately doesn't exist outside the runtime.
Quick check for your own site
Open dev tools, hover a link that visually changes, and watch the Styles panel. If you see a transition property with a nonzero duration, it might survive a stripped export. If you see the transform jump instantly to a new matrix value with no transition line, it's runtime-driven and will need one of the two approaches above.