Miriam Schwab, Head of WordPress at Elementor, joined the Jukebox Podcast to discuss her long history in the WordPress ecosystem, Elementor’s growth over its first decade, and how AI is shaping the product and the wider platform.
Background
Miriam discovered WordPress about 20 years ago, built an agency focused on custom WordPress work for tech companies and nonprofits, sold it, and founded Strattic, a startup that published WordPress sites as static while retaining dynamic capabilities. Strattic solved speed, security, and scalability issues, raised venture funding, and was acquired by Elementor in June 2022. After leading the Strattic team, Miriam took on the role of Head of WordPress at Elementor, acting as a liaison between Elementor and the WordPress community across strategy, product, community, and partnerships.
Elementor’s growth and responsibility
Elementor launched ten years ago and quickly reached massive adoption. Miriam cites W3Techs figures showing Elementor grew from about 11.7% to 13.1% of the entire web over 2025, meaning it now powers over 13% of websites. That growth includes millions of new sites in 2025 alone.
With scale comes responsibility: backwards compatibility is critical. WordPress sites are highly heterogeneous (themes, plugins, server setups, PHP versions), so every major update requires extensive QA and careful migration strategies. Elementor v4 is a major overhaul intended to modernize a decade-old codebase; it will likely require coexistence of v3 and v4 pages on many sites and careful migration tooling.
Company scale and product teams
Elementor has grown in staff size (around 350 people) to support development, compatibility, and new initiatives. The team balances innovation with careful rollout to avoid breaking the diverse set of sites using the product.
Elementor and AI: a multi-pronged approach
Elementor is pursuing multiple AI efforts, each aimed at different user needs:
1) In-editor AI features
These are the expected capabilities: generating images, creating copy, and other content tasks directly inside the Elementor editor. These features address common design and content workflows and are already considered baseline expectations by many users.
2) Angie — agentic AI for WordPress
Angie is a standalone plugin that brings agentic AI capabilities to WordPress broadly (not just Elementor). It exposes a set of “tools” for site management tasks: content creation, user and category management, WooCommerce operations, and other administrative actions. Angie can act on site tasks, but because AI is non-deterministic, the team has built guardrails and is iterating on safety, confirmation flows, and undo functionality. Angie is free and open to user feedback via the plugin repository.
Angie’s toolset was developed before the WordPress Abilities API matured. The Angie team created its own tooling—roughly 200 exposed tools including integrations with WooCommerce and ACF. Elementor intends to align Angie with the Abilities API and is collaborating with WordPress AI teams to integrate and standardize capabilities.
3) Site Planner — conversational site building
Site Planner is a guided, conversational tool that takes a user from idea to an initial site structure and wireframe. Rather than a single-shot prompt, it asks clarifying and suggestive questions to build a brief, site map, and wireframes with content blocks tailored to the user’s needs. Site Planner aims to get a site to about 80–90% completeness: content, sitemap, and structure are generated, and the result can be exported to Elementor or other hosting workflows. It’s useful for non-professionals who don’t know the right questions to ask and for professionals to accelerate discovery and client approval.
Site Planner supports iterative refinement (regenerating sections, adjusting structure, changing color palettes, uploading logos). Currently an external tool, the plan is to integrate it more tightly into the Elementor/WordPress environment so users can duplicate and regenerate pages inside the site more fluidly.
Abilities API and the future of AI in WordPress
Miriam praised the Abilities API as a crucial standardization for AI integrations in WordPress. The Abilities API provides a consistent way for AI to discover and invoke site capabilities (create posts, manage users, etc.), making AI interactions with WordPress more predictable and extensible. For a 20+ year platform, standardizing access is essential to keep WordPress relevant and interoperable with evolving AI models and agent architectures.
Elementor sees the Abilities API as enabling deeper AI workflows across plugins and hosting setups, but notes the ecosystem needed time to build the required tools; Elementor’s early Angie work predated much of that standardization. The company is collaborating with WordPress teams to adopt and leverage the Abilities API where appropriate.
Granularity, creativity, and v4
Miriam says basic AI tasks are already common, but deeper, more creative AI control is coming. Elementor v4 will expand AI capabilities, enabling finer-grained design control: custom code snippets, bespoke widgets, and more advanced manipulations beyond templated sections. This allows AI to act not just as a content or image generator, but as a creative collaborator that can produce novel layouts, styles, and interactions when directed by users.
Human-in-the-loop, skills shift, and the value proposition
Miriam argues AI will change the nature of web work rather than eliminate the need for humans. AI will speed processes and often produce higher-quality outputs, but it needs direction. The crucial skill becomes defining what a great site should be and guiding AI to that result. Roles will shift toward strategist, director, and producer rather than manual tinkerers. The user’s ability to provide high-quality prompts and make final decisions determines outcomes; AI amplifies skill rather than fully replaces it.
Support, safety, and guardrails
Introducing agentic AI across sites raises significant support and safety considerations. Elementor has implemented guardrails to prevent destructive actions (for example, preventing Angie from removing an admin user without confirmation). Undo flows, confirmation prompts, and logs are part of mitigating risks.
Support will evolve: AI can both complicate debugging (was it Elementor, a third-party plugin, or the AI that caused a change?) and improve support via automated analysis—AI can scan documentation and logs to suggest fixes. But cross-plugin AI interactions and conflicts represent a new class of troubleshooting challenges.
Accessibility and quality controls
Elementor has also focused on accessibility. The Ally plugin (available for any WordPress site) scans sites for accessibility issues, suggests fixes, and can apply some fixes via AI-assisted actions. AI isn’t an automatic fix-all for accessibility; it requires tools, direction, and concrete guardrails. Ally represents an approach where AI helps surface issues and implement practical improvements, though full WCAG compliance remains complex.
Challenges ahead
Miriam acknowledges the ecosystem was late to AI in some respects—open-source governance and committee processes can slow rapid adoption—but the WordPress AI teams have moved quickly to define priorities. Integrating AI safely into a legacy platform with millions of unique sites is a major engineering, product, and community challenge.
She also notes the composability problem: when multiple AI-powered plugins and services act on a site, isolating root causes of issues and coordinating behavior becomes harder. Standardization like the Abilities API helps, but the community will still need conventions, testing, and tooling for debugging AI-driven interactions.
Outlook
Miriam is optimistic about 2026 and beyond. She believes AI will reignite innovation in WordPress, making advanced capabilities accessible across the ecosystem. Elementor is investing across several fronts—editor integrations, Angie, Site Planner, and v4—to provide both in-editor convenience and platform-wide agentic power. The emphasis is on careful rollout, safety, collaboration with WordPress core teams, and evolving workflows that preserve human creativity and oversight.
Conclusion
Elementor’s decade of growth has positioned it as a major web platform. The company is now pushing forward on multiple AI fronts—inline editor features, agentic automation via Angie, conversational site creation with Site Planner, and deeper integrations planned for v4—while navigating the technical and support complexities that come with applying AI to a 20-year-old, highly diverse ecosystem. Miriam’s view is that AI will make WordPress more powerful and accessible but will require new guardrails, tooling, and skills to realize its promise safely.
