Miriam Schwab joins the Jukebox Podcast to discuss her two-decade history with WordPress, Elementor’s rapid growth, and how AI is shaping the platform’s future. Miriam began offering WordPress as a service, ran a custom WordPress agency for tech companies and nonprofits, then founded Strattic to publish WordPress sites in static architectures while preserving dynamic features. Strattic, which addressed speed, security, and scalability, raised venture funding and was acquired by Elementor in June 2022. Miriam then became Elementor’s Head of WordPress, acting as a liaison between Elementor and the wider WordPress community on practical, strategic, and community matters.
Elementor’s growth
Elementor launched nearly a decade ago and quickly became popular, thanks in part to a robust free version that attracted broad adoption. Miriam reports remarkable continued growth: W3Techs recognized Elementor as a top content management system in 2025, and Elementor’s share of the web reportedly rose from about 11.7% to 13.1% over that year — meaning over 13% of websites use Elementor. The company staff has grown to roughly 350 people to support development, QA, and compatibility work.
Maintaining compatibility and major updates
With a large installed base, backwards compatibility is critical. Elementor’s codebase is about a decade old, and version 4 represents a major overhaul designed to move the product forward. Migrating existing sites will be complex; Elementor expects sites to coexist with pages built in older versions while new pages take advantage of v4 features. The team prioritizes careful QA and considered migration strategies to minimize disruption given WordPress sites’ varied themes, plugins, and server environments.
Elementor and AI: a multi-pronged approach
Elementor is pursuing multiple AI initiatives:
– Built-in editor AI: Inside the Elementor editor, users can generate images, text, and other typical AI-powered content features. These are the expected, immediate use cases for designers and content creators.
– Angie plugin: Angie is a standalone, free plugin that brings agentic AI capabilities across WordPress, not just to Elementor users. Angie exposes a wide set of “tools” or actions for WordPress, enabling site management tasks like creating and scheduling posts, managing users, handling WooCommerce products, and more. Because Angie was developed before WordPress’s Abilities API matured, the team built out roughly 200 tools and integrations (including for WooCommerce and ACF). The plan is to sync Angie with the Abilities API as it stabilizes, while continuing to develop guardrails to prevent destructive actions.
– Site Planner: Site Planner is a conversational AI that guides users — both novices and professionals — from an idea to a wireframed website. It asks clarifying and suggestive questions, generates a brief and sitemap, produces page content and wireframes (what Miriam describes as getting the site “80–90% of the way there”), and allows users to edit content chunks, re-order pages, change palettes, and upload logos. Final sites can be exported to a hosting environment, sent to an Elementor account, or downloaded as a ZIP. Site Planner is especially valuable for overcoming the blank-canvas problem and speeding client communication; it can produce drafts to iterate from, and regeneration of sections is possible.
Abilities API and agentic AI
Miriam highlights the significance of the Abilities API for binding AI to WordPress capabilities. While initial Angie development predated the Abilities API and implemented its own tools, the Abilities API standardizes how AI interfaces with WordPress, abstracting many plugin and platform differences. This standardization is crucial for enabling AI agents to perform the broad set of WordPress actions beyond simple content generation, and it helps future-proof AI integrations against evolving LLMs and agent types.
Practical constraints and creative granularity
Current AI outputs in Elementor are constrained by how Elementor traditionally builds layouts and widgets, but version 4 aims to grant AI more creative and granular capabilities. Future integrations are expected to allow AI to produce custom code snippets, widgets, and other bespoke elements, making conversational edits (e.g., “use a different image, make the border rounder, add a box shadow, swap text position”) a more realistic workflow. As AI becomes more capable, human roles will shift: creators will act more as directors and strategists, guiding AI rather than manually performing every tweak.
Support, guardrails, and risk management
Introducing AI agents raises new support and safety challenges. Angie’s early testing revealed the need for strict guardrails — for example, preventing an agent from removing a site user without clear confirmation. Undo mechanisms, confirmation flows, logs, and explanatory summaries of AI actions are necessary. Support workflows must adapt to handle agent-driven changes and to diagnose issues when multiple AI systems or plugins interact. While AI can improve support by surfacing knowledge and solutions from vast corpora, it also complicates debugging when conflicts cross plugin, core, and AI boundaries.
Accessibility and quality assurance
Elementor has invested in accessibility tooling, notably the Ally plugin, which scans sites for accessibility issues and offers fixes and guidance. AI can implement suggested fixes, and continual accessibility checks can help maintain compliance as sites evolve. Miriam cautions that AI does not automatically guarantee accessibility; it requires proper tools, direction, and integration to be effective.
The human in the loop and the future of work
Miriam emphasizes that AI’s value depends on the user’s ability to direct it. While many tasks become faster, the higher payoff is improved quality. Professionals will need to shift from manual execution to higher-level directing, curation, strategy, and quality control. AI will be a team member for many tasks, providing options and competing outputs, with humans choosing and refining results. This transition creates both efficiency and questions about redundancy and value redefinition in web design and development.
Looking ahead
Miriam sees AI as reinvigorating innovation in WordPress. The platform’s open-source nature and the work on the Abilities API have positioned WordPress to leverage AI in ways that could outpace proprietary platforms. Elementor’s ongoing v4 overhaul, Angie, Site Planner, and accessibility efforts reflect a broader push to make AI-driven site creation, management, and support powerful and safe. Miriam expects 2026 to be a year of rapid change, experimentation, and novel tools for WordPress and the web-building ecosystem.