Our favourite Framer tricks for sites clients edit themselves

We judge a site we’ve built on a Tuesday three months after launch, when someone at the client has ten minutes before a meeting, changes a price and hits publish. Launch day tells us much less.

Every site we make is built in Framer, and most are edited by people who have never opened Figma. These are the habits João and Ricardo have settled on so that Tuesday goes well.

Make the safe edit the easy one

Clients will always take the shortest route to a change. The build’s job is to make the shortest route the correct one.

Styles for every text and colour

Every text on the site uses a named text style, and every colour is a colour style. When Eixo changed its booking blue, one style changed and 12 clinic pages followed.

Components with fields

Anything that repeats, like a team card, a price row or a clinic’s opening hours, is a component with variables. Whoever is editing fills a few fields in the right-hand panel, and the layout can’t drift. An empty field hides its layer, so a missing photo leaves no grey box.

We decide where each kind of content lives before the first page is built:

Protect the parts that shouldn’t move

Some layers are there for the design, and a stray click shouldn’t be able to drag them.

Lock the scenery

Backgrounds, dividers and decorative shapes get locked in Framer, so a click on a heading selects the heading. It sounds minor until a client has nudged a background photo 40 pixels left on the phone breakpoint without noticing.

Name the frames

Every section and container gets a plain name, like Services or Clinic Hours. Someone opening the layers panel should find the price table without asking us where it is.

Hand over with a checklist

The handover is a 90-minute call and a one-page Notion checklist. Before we leave, someone at the client does each of these while we watch:

1. Add a CMS item and publish it.

2. Swap a team photo and write its alt text.

3. Change a price inside a component.

4. Restore an older version from the history.

What happens after handover

Sebe, the garden designer in Porto, now adds a garden in an afternoon. Eixo’s twelve clinics each keep their own page up to date.

Both fixes were the same slip, a cover photo pasted into the body of a page instead of its Cover field. That case now has its own line on the checklist.

Try one this week

You don’t need a rebuild to use any of this. Open your site, lock three decorative layers, rename five frames and turn one repeated card into a component. That’s an hour’s work, and the next person to edit the site will feel the difference.

If your team is planning a site it will run itself, tell us what you’re launching and we’ll show you how we’d set it up.