To move a design from Figma into Framer, you use the official "Figma to HTML with Framer" plugin: you select the layers in Figma, copy them, and paste them onto your Framer canvas. The plugin carries over your structure, auto layout and basic styling, so it is a genuine head start. What it is not is a finished website. Think of the import as converting your design into editable Framer elements, after which you still build the responsive, interactive site around them.

How the import actually works

The workflow is copy and paste, not a single automated export. You install the plugin inside Figma, select a frame or a set of layers, and paste directly into Framer. Framer translates the selection into its own layers so you can keep editing everything natively. There is also a separate browser extension for pulling layouts in from live web pages, but for a Figma source the plugin is the route you want.

What transfers cleanly

In practice the reliable parts of the transfer are the ones tied to layout and content. Framer preserves your layer hierarchy, auto layout settings, fills and colors, text content, and images. If your Figma file was built with tidy auto layout and a clear structure, the paste lands much closer to what you designed. Messy, absolutely positioned layers tend to come across as messy, absolutely positioned layers, so the cleaner the source file, the better the result.

What does not transfer, and what to rebuild

Some things do not map across, and it is better to plan for that than be surprised by it. Custom fonts are not pulled in automatically, so you add them again inside Framer. Figma component variants do not convert into Framer's own variant system, so shared components usually need to be rebuilt as native Framer components if you want them to stay reusable. Interactive elements and certain visual details such as corner smoothing may not survive the trip either. None of this is a dealbreaker, but it does mean the paste is the beginning of the build, not the end of it.

Turning a pasted design into a real website

Once the design is in Framer, the actual web work starts. You set up responsive behavior across breakpoints, wire up links and interactions, connect any repeating content to the CMS, and add the animations and states that make the page feel alive. This is where a static artboard becomes something that publishes, scales on mobile, and can be updated later without reopening Figma. It is also where a lot of the value sits, because a pixel-perfect paste that breaks on a phone helps nobody.

Should you design in Figma first at all?

For complex product UI, design systems and team collaboration, Figma is still an excellent place to think. But if the deliverable is a marketing site or a landing page, you can often skip the round trip and design directly in Framer, since it is already a build-and-publish tool. Our own approach at Urest, a Certified Framer studio, is to treat Figma as optional rather than mandatory: sometimes it earns its place in the workflow, and sometimes it just adds a handoff step. We run design, development and growth in one senior team of five with no handoffs, which is exactly the friction the Figma-to-Framer step is meant to remove.

If you want a second opinion on whether your Figma files are worth importing or whether it is faster to build fresh in Framer, we are happy to look at your specific project. Book a discovery call and we will walk through the most efficient path from your design to a live site.