My Honest Framer SEO Review (2024)

Framer is one of the newest website builders on the block - and it also happens to be one of my favorites. It takes your designs straight from idea to live site and is incredibly quick, fun to use once you learn it, and growing quickly. I also consider it be the best alternative to ShowIt.

But is Framer a good website platform for SEO? Yes.

In this post I'll review all of Framer's SEO features, and tell you why I think it's a great platform for SEO.

Who am I to tell you?

I'm Hannah from The SEO Kitchen, and I've been doing SEO in some form since 2010. I've been VP of Operations at an SEO agency, built and optimized countless websites, helping clients that are household names and small mom-and-pop-shops hit page 1 of Google, and trained over 2300+ students in my programs. Some of those students have gone on to 10x their traffic.

In The SEO Kitchen, I create web design training and templates for students who want to build seo-friendly websites. And this website you're reading right now? Well, it's actually on Framer. That's how much I trust it.

Framer SEO Features

Framer has all of the basic SEO features I expect to see in any website platform worth its weight in pixels, and then some. When I first began investigating it, I actually thought its design capabilities with everything it said it could do on the SEO side seemed too good to be true.

• Indexable content - duh. Believe it or not, some website platforms these days still aren't crawler-friendly, think Wix circa 2011.

• Granular meta data customization - Edit the page titles and meta descriptions of every page and post you create.

• Clean URLs out of the box + complete URL customization - No wonky URLs or awful site structures here. Framer's URLs are pretty and customizable.

• Built-in XML sitemaps - Every Framer site will automatically have a sitemap generated for it at /sitemap.xml

• Built in robots.txt file - Framer creates it for you automatically, however note that you can't fully edit it (currently)

• Blogging capabilities + blog optimization - You can blog easy as pie in Framer. In fact Framer has a pretty great CMS capability that will allow you to create any custom post type, including blog posts.

• Heading tags - Use headings wherever you want in your content.

• Alt tags - Apply alt tags to all of your images.

• Accessible, semantic HTML - Define each section of your site with the appropriate semantic HTML tag, instead of building a wall of <divs>

• Built in SSL certs - Framer automatically generates SSL certificates for its sites. I literally don't have to fiddle with an SSL cert ever.

Top if all off with super-fast page loading speeds - and when I say fast, I mean blazing fast, literally one of the fastest platforms I've built on - and that's a pretty darn good list of SEO capabilities if you ask me.

Framer Cons

There really are not many cons I can think of with Framer, and that's after having my site on it for a few months now. I am keeping an eye out for SEO downsides, though.

No Custom Canonicals on Smaller Plans

Need the ability to set custom canonical links? This isn't something that is currently available on the plans below the Enterprise plan.

No Sitewide Meta-Data Management

You can't seta meta data templates for sitewide content.

No Granular CMS Page Title Management

You can't fully edit the page titles on your CMS items, as Framer appends your site name to the end. CMS items default to have a page title format of [item name] [sep] [site name] - however this is exactly the template I would use on any other platform, so I'm fine with this.

The Design Learning Curve

Although this review is focused on Framer's SEO capabilities, the design learning curve will mean this isn't the right platform for everyone. You design literally every single section and component from scratch. (I like to bake from scratch, too, so I find it exciting.)

Blogging Limitations

If you're coming from a Wordpress blog, you'll be used to adding plugins, shortcakes, and blocks that can break up your blog content with things like CTAs, opt-in boxes, and ad space. You'll also be used to snazzy things like dynamic sidebars.

Although I know Framer probably can pull off some of those things with some snazzy workarounds - like adding your desired block as a code snippet and then adding that code snippet where you want it to show up, similar to a shortcode - it's not something I've gone after yet.

Mostly because this site isn't the type to have its primary content littered with ads and opt-ins. (Yet.)

That's really it for "cons", and they aren't the worst. If you read my ShowIt SEO review, you'll know what I mean.

The Verdict: Do I recommend Framer for SEO? Absolutely.

Framer is a great platform for any website owner who cares about SEO. It's one of the fastest-loading, most innovative hosted website platforms out there at the time of writing this. It competes with Webflow and WordPress and has everything most sites would need.

The design learning curve is very different from other more traditional hosted website platforms, though. Think if a Figma design was able to become a live website. Site owners moving to Framer will need to be prepared to hire a designer or to build their site using mockup-style tools, building each section and element from scratch, instead of the traditional website editor we imagine.

Love Framer? Have questions? Tag me on Instagram and let me know!