Framer Site Loading Slow? Here's What Real Users Are Experiencing (2026)

The Pattern We Keep Seeing

We analyzed 1,199 Framer community support posts. Performance complaints appear constantly: from all-caps “SLOW LOADING WEBSITE” to detailed technical breakdowns of Lighthouse scores, mobile rendering failures, and animation stutter. This is not a fringe issue. It is one of the most common categories of support requests on the platform.

The complaints follow a predictable pattern. Someone builds a site in Framer, publishes it, and then discovers it loads slowly, especially on mobile and on first visit. They post in the community forum asking for help. The responses usually suggest compressing images, reducing animations, or removing third-party embeds. Sometimes that helps. Often it does not, because the core issue is Framer's architecture itself.

The Speed Problems People Report

First-load slowness

The most common complaint is that Framer sites load slowly on the first visit. The preloader spins, the page stays blank, and users wait. This is not about image optimization or CDN configuration. It is about how much JavaScript Framer ships before any content can render.

These are not outliers. The all-caps titles reflect real frustration from users who expected a polished platform to produce fast-loading sites by default. The post titled “Framer site loads very slowly on first visit: how do I diagnose and fix?” gets to the heart of it: people do not understand why it is slow, because they did not add anything unusual. The slowness comes from the platform.

Mobile-specific lag

Mobile performance is where Framer sites struggle the most. The JavaScript runtime that powers Framer's interactivity is expensive on lower-powered mobile devices. Users report pages that refuse to load properly on real phones, even when they look fine in browser dev tools.

The gap between desktop and mobile performance is a recurring theme. A site might load in 2 seconds on a MacBook with fast Wi-Fi, then take 6-8 seconds on an Android phone on a cellular connection. That is enough to lose most visitors before they see any content.

Animation jank and stutter

Framer's selling point is beautiful animations. But when those animations are rendered through a heavy JavaScript runtime on mid-range devices, they stutter. Slideshows lag. Custom cursors trail behind the actual cursor position. Scroll animations jerk instead of flowing.

Safari users get hit particularly hard. Framer's JavaScript runtime has known compatibility issues with WebKit, leading to degraded performance on the browser used by every iPhone and most Mac users.

Video loading failures

Video-heavy Framer sites face a compounding problem. The platform's own runtime consumes bandwidth and processing power, leaving less room for video content to load efficiently. Vimeo embeds, background videos, and auto-playing clips regularly fail to load on mobile devices.

Third-party embed bloat

Adding external tools to a Framer site compounds the performance problem. Every embed (forms, analytics, chat widgets) adds its own JavaScript to an already heavy page. Users who add HubSpot forms, for example, discover that the combination of Framer's runtime plus HubSpot's scripts creates a load time that drives visitors away.

Some users have even reported their computers struggling under the weight of their own Framer projects, and unexplained bandwidth spikes on published sites.

Why Framer Sites Are Slow (The Technical Reason)

Framer is not a static site builder. It is a JavaScript application that renders your website on the client side. Every Framer site ships with a runtime: a bundle of JS that handles page transitions, animations, interactions, and layout. This runtime executes before your visitors see any content.

Here is what loads before your actual website appears:

• Framer runtime (~200-400KB of JS): the engine that powers all interactions, page transitions, and responsive layout logic. This must parse and execute before anything renders.
• Preloader: Framer shows a loading animation while the runtime boots. On fast connections this is brief. On mobile 4G, it can last several seconds.
• Font loading (sometimes 100+ files): one community post reported “100+ Inter/Inter Display woff2 files & styles” being loaded. Framer sometimes loads every weight and style of a font family, whether or not the page uses them.
• Unoptimized images: Framer does not always serve properly sized images. A 3000px wide image may be served to a 375px mobile screen without responsive sizing, wasting bandwidth and delaying render.
• Third-party scripts: any embed, analytics tool, or external widget adds its own JS. Framer's runtime plus HubSpot plus Google Analytics plus a chat widget can easily push total page JavaScript past 2MB.

What Optimization Looks Like in Framer vs Code

In Framer, performance optimization means adjusting settings and hoping for the best. You can compress images, limit fonts, and remove animations, but the fundamental runtime overhead is untouchable. You are optimizing around a bottleneck you cannot remove.

In exported code, you control everything:

• Lazy loading: load images and videos only when they scroll into view. In Framer, this behavior depends on the runtime. In code, you add loading="lazy" to an img tag.
• Font subsetting: instead of loading 100+ woff2 files, you load exactly the character sets you need. A subset of Inter for English text is ~20KB instead of ~500KB+.
• CDN configuration: host on Vercel, Netlify, or Cloudflare Pages with aggressive caching, Brotli compression, and edge delivery. Your HTML loads from the server nearest to each visitor.
• Bundle elimination: no Framer runtime, no preloader, no unnecessary JS. A static HTML page with CSS and optimized images loads in under 1 second.
• Critical CSS inlining: inline the CSS needed for above-the-fold content so the page renders immediately, then load the rest asynchronously.

Typical page weight comparison

Metric	Framer-hosted	Exported static HTML
Total page weight	1.5 – 3+ MB	200 – 400 KB
JavaScript loaded	500KB – 1.2MB	0 – 20 KB
Font files	100+ woff2 files possible	2 – 4 subsetted files
First Contentful Paint	2.5 – 5+ seconds	0.4 – 0.8 seconds
Lighthouse Performance	40 – 70	95 – 100
Preloader / blank screen	Yes (runtime boot)	None

The difference is not marginal. A Framer-hosted site typically ships 5-10x more data than the same design exported as static HTML and properly optimized. That translates directly to slower load times, worse SEO rankings, and higher bounce rates, especially on mobile. Performance is one of several platform-level constraints we document in our complete Framer limitations guide.