Miriam Schwab, Head of WordPress at Elementor, joined the WP Tavern Jukebox Podcast to reflect on her long history in WordPress, Elementor’s rapid growth, and how AI is reshaping the platform and ecosystem.
Background
Miriam described roughly 20 years in the WordPress space: starting by offering WordPress as a service, running a custom agency for tech companies and nonprofits, then founding Strattic—an approach that published WordPress sites in a static architecture while preserving dynamic features. Strattic solved many speed, security, and scalability problems, raised venture funding, and was acquired by Elementor in June 2022. After leading the Strattic team for a while, Miriam took on the Head of WordPress role at Elementor, acting as a liaison between the company and the broader WordPress community across strategy, product, community, and partnerships.
Elementor’s growth and responsibility
Elementor launched ten years ago with a generous free version and a pro tier that together helped the plugin gain traction quickly. Miriam noted that Elementor continued to grow throughout 2025, with W3Techs reporting it moved from about 11.7% to 13.1% share of the entire web—an astonishing reach for a single page-builder ecosystem. That scale brings benefits and burdens: backwards compatibility and quality assurance are critical because WordPress sites are highly heterogeneous in themes, plugins, server setups, and PHP versions. Elementor has grown to roughly 350 employees to support development, QA, and the broad product surface.
A major codebase overhaul: v4
Elementor is preparing a significant overhaul in v4 to modernize a decade-old codebase. Miriam emphasized the complexity: many users will not be able to migrate every page immediately, so the new and old systems must interoperate for a time. The team is carefully balancing innovation and risk, with substantial QA and migration planning required to let sites run pages built on both versions when necessary.
Elementor’s multi-pronged AI strategy
Elementor approaches AI on several fronts:
– In-editor AI: Expected capabilities such as image and text generation are already integrated into the Elementor editor for content and creative workflows.
– Angie: A standalone, free plugin built to provide agentic AI capabilities across WordPress—beyond Elementor. Angie exposes tools to manage sites: creating posts, managing users and products, scheduling, and other site administration tasks. The team built many integrations (around 200 tools, plus connections to widely used plugins like WooCommerce and ACF) before the WordPress Abilities API matured. The plan is to align and leverage the Abilities API as it stabilizes.
– Site Planner: A conversational AI tool that guides users from an idea to a wireframed website. It asks clarifying questions, builds a brief, produces a sitemap with content chunks, and creates wireframes (about 80–90% complete). Users can tweak content, structure, styles, and then export the site to hosting or download a package. Site Planner is intended to speed client discovery and cut the blank-canvas friction for non-professionals and agencies alike.
Abilities API and WordPress’s AI future
Miriam praised the Abilities API as a foundational step enabling AI to interact with a broad set of WordPress capabilities in a standardized way. Because WordPress is a legacy but extensible platform, a unified abilities layer helps third-party tools and agents interface coherently with sites. Elementor’s team had already developed its own tools exposing WordPress functions to Angie; now they’re working with the core AI teams to sync with the Abilities API where possible. The API standardization should make it easier for agents to perform site actions reliably across disparate plugins and setups.
How AI changes roles and workflows
Miriam stressed that AI is becoming a practical team member for many tasks: content generation, rapid prototyping, and design iterations. But she emphasized the continuing importance of the human “in the loop.” The value will shift from manual tinkering to direction, curation, and strategy—deciding what makes an excellent site, shaping AI outputs, and ensuring quality. AI can accelerate workflows and raise baseline quality, but human judgment, creativity, and domain knowledge remain essential.
Support, guardrails, and safety
Introducing agentic AI raises support and safety concerns. Miriam gave an example where Angie (in early testing) removed her user—an edge case that drove the need for robust guardrails. Elementor is implementing safety checks, confirmations, and undo capability. Support systems will need to evolve: logs and traceability of AI actions will help diagnosing issues, but conflicts may become more complex when multiple AI-driven tools and third-party plugins act on a site. Conversely, AI can also improve support by surfacing relevant documentation and proposed fixes from a large corpus of knowledge.
Accessibility and AI
Miriam explained that AI is not an automatic fix for accessibility. Elementor developed an accessibility plugin called Ally that audits sites, identifies issues, suggests fixes, and can apply fixes with AI assistance. The goal is not to claim perfect compliance but to make accessibility improvements continuous and more manageable by combining detection, guidance, and corrective actions.
Product direction and integration
Site Planner currently exists as an external tool; plans are to fold more of its features into the Elementor/WordPress environment so users can duplicate and regenerate pages, run iterations, and more directly manage multiple versions. v4 of Elementor and deeper AI integration aim to enable more granular, creative, and coded outputs—custom snippets, widgets, and advanced styling driven by AI when needed.
Outlook
Miriam is optimistic about 2026 and beyond. She sees AI reigniting innovation in the WordPress ecosystem, making advanced capabilities more accessible, and helping WordPress compete with proprietary platforms. The immediate priorities are rolling out useful AI tooling responsibly, aligning with WordPress core efforts like the Abilities API, and continuing to manage the responsibilities that come with serving a large share of sites on the web.
The conversation highlighted the dual challenge for the WordPress ecosystem: enabling powerful, agentic AI experiences while keeping sites safe, accessible, and reliable. As Miriam put it, AI will change how work is done—making many tasks faster and often higher quality—while elevating the importance of human direction, strategy, and oversight.