Miriam Schwab, Head of WordPress at Elementor, discussed her long involvement with WordPress, Elementor’s rapid expansion, and how artificial intelligence is reshaping both the product and the broader platform.
From WordPress practitioner to platform lead
Miriam found WordPress roughly two decades ago, built and sold an agency focused on custom WordPress work, and later co-founded Strattic, a startup that published WordPress sites as static while preserving dynamic features to solve speed, security, and scale issues. Strattic grew with venture funding and was acquired by Elementor in mid-2022. After integrating the Strattic team, Miriam moved into the Head of WordPress role, serving as a bridge between Elementor and the WordPress community across product, partnerships, strategy, and community engagement.
Scale and responsibility
Elementor has scaled quickly over its first decade. Using public usage metrics as a reference, Miriam notes the plugin reached just over 13% of websites—growth that included millions of new sites in a short period. That reach brings responsibility: WordPress sites vary widely in themes, plugins, hosting, PHP versions and custom code, so maintaining backwards compatibility and carefully managing migrations is critical. Elementor v4 is a substantial modernization of a decade-old codebase; it will require coexistence strategies, careful QA, and migration tooling to avoid breaking diverse live sites.
Team and product discipline
To support compatibility and new initiatives, Elementor has grown its team size to a few hundred employees. The company emphasizes measured rollouts and thorough testing to balance innovation with the reality that its software runs on millions of unique sites.
A multi-pronged AI strategy
Elementor is pursuing several AI directions, each aimed at different user needs:
– In-editor AI: Core editor features—copy generation, image creation, and other content tasks—are being integrated directly into the builder. These are now baseline expectations for many users and speed up common design workflows.
– Angie: agentic AI for WordPress: Angie is a standalone, plugin-based agent that can perform site-management tasks beyond Elementor itself. It exposes a toolbox for actions like content creation, taxonomy and user management, and WooCommerce operations. Because agentic behaviors are non-deterministic, Elementor built guardrails: confirmation flows, undo capabilities, and safety checks to prevent destructive actions (for example, blocking deletion of an admin without explicit approval). Angie was developed before the WordPress Abilities API matured and currently offers roughly two hundred tools and integrations; Elementor plans to align Angie with the Abilities API and collaborate with WordPress AI efforts to standardize capabilities. Angie is free and available for user feedback.
– Site Planner: conversational site building: Site Planner guides users from idea to structure by asking clarifying questions and producing a brief, sitemap, wireframes and content blocks. It targets about 80–90% of a starting site—structure, key content and wireframes—so users or agencies can export and continue work in Elementor or other workflows. It supports iterative refinement (regenerating sections, changing colors, uploading logos) and is currently an external tool, with plans to integrate it more tightly into Elementor so pages can be duplicated and regenerated inside sites.
Standards: the Abilities API
Miriam highlights the Abilities API as critical infrastructure for standardizing how AI interacts with WordPress. The API provides a consistent way for AI agents to discover and invoke site capabilities (creating posts, managing users, interacting with plugins), which is essential for a platform as old and diverse as WordPress. Elementor views the API as enabling richer cross-plugin AI workflows, while acknowledging the ecosystem needed time to build supporting tools; early Angie work predated much of this standardization.
Deeper creativity in v4
Beyond basic generation, Elementor v4 aims to give AI finer-grained control: custom code snippets, bespoke widgets, and advanced manipulations that let AI act as a creative collaborator rather than just a content or image generator. This opens possibilities for novel layouts, interactions, and styling driven by user direction.
Human-in-the-loop and shifting roles
Miriam argues that AI will shift how web work is done rather than eliminate jobs. AI speeds and elevates output, but it requires direction. The most valuable human skills will be strategy, creative direction, and the ability to define what makes a great site and steer AI toward that vision. Prompting, oversight, and final judgment remain essential; AI amplifies human skill rather than fully replacing it.
Support, safety and interoperability challenges
Agentic AI introduces new support and safety complexities. Guardrails—undo, confirmations, logs—are important, but debugging becomes harder when multiple plugins or agentic systems can change a site. AI can both complicate root-cause analysis and improve support by scanning logs and documentation to propose fixes. Composability—how multiple AI-enabled plugins interact—remains a significant challenge and will require conventions, testing, and tooling.
Accessibility and practical fixes
Elementor is also working on accessibility tools. The Ally plugin scans sites for accessibility issues, suggests fixes, and can apply some improvements via AI-assisted actions. Miriam stresses AI is not a cure-all for WCAG compliance; it helps surface issues and implement fixes, but human oversight and structured tools are still necessary for complete accessibility.
Outlook
Miriam is optimistic about the near future. She sees AI reigniting innovation in WordPress and making advanced capabilities more widely accessible. Elementor is investing across in-editor features, Angie, Site Planner, and the v4 modernization to offer convenience and platform-level agentic power while emphasizing careful rollout, safety, and collaboration with WordPress core teams. The goal is to preserve human creativity and oversight while unlocking faster, more capable site building.
In short, Elementor’s growth positions it as a major platform player, and the company is actively shaping how AI will be used inside WordPress—balancing ambitious agentic features with the guardrails, standards, and tooling needed to support millions of heterogeneous sites safely.