Why Framer Uses React to Build Sites?
Introduction:
Conventional web development techniques remain fundamental in today’s landscape, but relying on them alone—without the aid of modern tools—can make it challenging to create the sophisticated interfaces and features that contemporary web applications demand. Developers often end up investing considerable time building foundational systems from scratch, rather than focusing on the product itself.
That’s where tools like React come in. Developed by Meta, React is one of the leading frontend libraries designed for modern web development. It enables developers across organizations of all sizes to efficiently build powerful, dynamic applications that meet—and often exceed—today’s user expectations.
Improved User Experience
The growing demand for interactive, feature-rich applications on the modern web has introduced new performance challenges. As websites become more complex, the resources required to load and operate them increase, which can strain performance—particularly on lower-end devices or slower internet connections.
This added complexity often leads to longer load times, sluggish responsiveness, and noticeable slowdowns, all of which fall short of the seamless, cross-platform experiences users have come to expect. In today’s web landscape, delays and unresponsive interfaces are simply not tolerated.
A major culprit behind these performance issues is inefficient visual updates. Every time the user interface changes, the browser initiates a sequence of operations known as the “pixel pipeline”—which involves calculating layouts, painting visual elements, and compositing layers to render the final display. While essential, this process can be resource-heavy and may block the main thread, resulting in laggy or frozen interfaces during updates.
React tackles modern performance challenges by leveraging the Virtual DOM—a lightweight, in-memory version of the actual DOM. Rather than updating the real DOM directly, which can lead to inefficient reflows and repaints, React computes the differences between the current and updated Virtual DOM states. This process, known as reconciliation, uses a powerful diffing algorithm to identify the minimal set of changes required. React then applies these updates in a single, optimized batch, reducing the overhead associated with DOM manipulation and improving rendering efficiency.
To further enhance performance, React includes a built-in scheduling mechanism that prioritizes updates based on user interactions and the device’s rendering capabilities. Tools like Framer take advantage of this feature to ensure that time-sensitive updates—such as responding to user input—are handled first, maintaining a fluid and responsive user experience.
Although React isn’t a silver bullet for performance, it equips developers with robust tools to meet the demands of modern web applications. By streamlining the update process, optimizing how and when changes are rendered, and intelligently prioritizing interactions, React helps developers build fast, dynamic interfaces without compromising user experience.
Component-Based Design
Traditional web development often relies on separating structure (HTML), styling (CSS), and behavior (JavaScript) into separate, monolithic files. While this approach works, it can become unwieldy as projects grow in complexity, making code harder to manage and reuse.
React introduces a more modern solution through its component-based architecture. In React, UI elements are built as self-contained, reusable components—small units that encapsulate structure, style, and behavior within a single file. These components can be created using JavaScript functions or classes and are driven by props (inputs) that determine how they behave and render. By combining smaller components into larger ones, developers can construct complex, scalable interfaces with cleaner, more maintainable code.
Framer builds on this concept by offering a wide range of high-quality, community-made React components that are ready to use out of the box. These pre-designed components can be dropped directly into a project, customized as needed, and reused throughout an application—streamlining development while maintaining visual and functional consistency.
By harnessing React’s modular approach, Framer enables developers to move faster without sacrificing quality. You get access to a rich library of polished, flexible UI components, helping you deliver elegant and responsive user experiences without the need to start from scratch.