Miriam Schwab, now Head of WordPress at Elementor, joined the Jukebox Podcast to reflect on her two decades in the WordPress ecosystem and how AI is reshaping site building. Her path moved from offering WordPress as a managed service to running a custom agency, then founding Strattic to serve static-publishing needs while preserving dynamic features. Strattic solved speed, security, and scale problems, received venture backing, and was acquired by Elementor in June 2022. Miriam now serves as a bridge between Elementor and the wider WordPress community, focusing on product strategy, compatibility, and practical community concerns.
Rapid adoption and scale
Elementor launched nearly ten years ago and grew quickly, boosted by a strong free tier that drove broad adoption. Growth has continued: third-party metrics named Elementor a leading CMS in 2025 and reported an increase in market share to over 13% of sites. To support development, QA, and compatibility work, the company has expanded to roughly 350 employees.
Backward compatibility and the v4 transition
A large installed base means careful compatibility planning is essential. Elementor’s codebase reflects nearly a decade of evolution, and version 4 is a major rewrite intended to unlock new capabilities. Migration will be incremental: older pages will coexist while new pages use v4 features. Because WordPress sites run many themes, plugins, and diverse hosting setups, the team emphasizes rigorous QA, conservative migration strategies, and tools that minimize disruption for site owners.
A multi-pronged AI strategy
Elementor is pushing AI on several fronts. First, built-in editor AI provides immediate content and image generation for designers and creators inside the editing experience. Second, Angie is a separate, free plugin that brings agent-like AI actions to WordPress broadly. Angie exposes many “tools” for common tasks—creating and scheduling posts, managing users, handling WooCommerce products, and interacting with custom fields—and was designed before WordPress’s Abilities API matured, so the team implemented about 200 integrations. As Abilities stabilizes, Angie will align with that standard while retaining guardrails to prevent destructive operations.
Third, Site Planner is a conversational AI workflow that takes users from idea to a usable site draft. It asks clarifying questions, builds a brief and sitemap, generates page content and wireframes, and lets users tweak content blocks, palettes, and page order. The result is often 80–90% of a site’s structure, ready to export to hosting, connect to an Elementor account, or download as a ZIP. Site Planner helps overcome blank-page paralysis and speeds client iteration by delivering drafts that can be refined.
Abilities API and agentic AI
The Abilities API matters because it standardizes how AI interfaces with WordPress capabilities, abstracting variations among plugins and platforms. That standardization is key to enabling agentic AI to perform a wide range of actions safely and reliably, and to future-proof integrations as LLMs and agent designs evolve. Angie’s initial toolset predated Abilities, but moving toward the API will improve interoperability.
Constraints, creative control, and future capabilities
Today, AI outputs are guided by Elementor’s existing layout and widget model, which constrains some creative flexibility. Version 4 aims to expand what AI can do at a granular level—producing custom code snippets, widgets, or bespoke elements—and to support conversational edits like swapping images, adjusting borders, or reflowing text. As AI capabilities grow, creators will increasingly act as directors and strategists, guiding AI outputs rather than manually executing every change.
Support, safety, and guardrails
Agentic features introduce support and safety challenges. Early Angie tests showed the need for clear confirmations, undo systems, action logs, and explanatory summaries so users know what agents did. Support teams will need new workflows to diagnose problems when AI, plugins, and core interact. Proper guardrails and observability are essential to prevent accidental destructive actions.
Accessibility and quality assurance
Elementor has invested in accessibility tooling, including the Ally plugin, which scans for issues and offers fixes. AI can apply suggested fixes and help maintain accessibility as sites change, but Miriam warns that AI alone doesn’t guarantee accessibility—tools, guidance, and human review are required.
Human-in-the-loop and the changing nature of work
Miriam emphasizes that AI’s value depends on users’ ability to direct it. While many tasks get faster, the real gains are in quality. Professionals will shift from hands-on construction to curation, strategy, and quality control, using AI as a productive team member that generates options to be chosen and refined. This will increase efficiency but also shift how value and roles are defined in web design and development.
Outlook
Miriam sees WordPress’s open source foundation and the Abilities API as positioning the platform to take full advantage of AI. Elementor’s v4 effort, Angie, Site Planner, and accessibility work illustrate a push toward powerful, safe AI-driven site creation and management. She expects 2026 to bring rapid experimentation, new tools, and meaningful changes across the web-building ecosystem.