Bookmarks only bookmark the top level pages (the framesets themselves). A user is unable to bookmark any of the Web pages viewed within a frame.

Frames can make the production of a website complicated, although current software addresses this problem.

It is easy to create badly constructed websites using frames. The most common mistake is to include a link that creates duplicate Web pages displayed within a frame.

Search engines that reference a Web page only give the address of that specific document. This means that search engines might link directly to a page that was intended to be displayed within a frameset.

Users have become so familiar with normal navigation using tables, the back button, and so on, that navigating through a site that uses frames can be a problem.

The use of too many frames can put a high workload on the server. A request for, say, ten files, each 1 Kilobyte in size, requires a greater workload than a request for a single 10 Kilobyte file.

Older browsers do not support frames.

The main advantage of frames is that it allows the user to view multiple documents within a single Web page.

It is possible to load pages from different servers in a single frameset.

The concern that older browsers do not support frames can be addressed using the <noframe> tag. This tag provides a section in an HTML document to include alternative content for browsers without support for frames. However, it requires that the Web designer provide two formats for one page.