Nathan Wrigley invited Miriam Schwab onto the Jukebox Podcast to talk about her long WordPress career, Elementor’s rapid expansion, and how AI is being folded into the platform’s next chapter.
Miriam’s WordPress journey spans nearly two decades. She started by offering WordPress as a managed service, ran a custom WordPress agency serving tech firms and nonprofits, and later co-founded Strattic, which delivered static WordPress architecture while preserving dynamic features. Strattic addressed speed, security, and scalability, secured venture funding, and was acquired by Elementor in June 2022. After the acquisition she led Strattic’s team and now serves as Head of WordPress at Elementor, bridging strategy, product, community, and partnerships between Elementor and the broader WordPress ecosystem.
Elementor turns ten in June and has grown quickly from day one. The free version helped adoption by offering a compelling product at the right time. Miriam cited W3Techs figures showing Elementor’s share of the web rose from roughly 11.7% to 13.1% in 2025, making it responsible for more than 13% of websites. In 2025 W3Techs named Elementor the top content-management platform by absolute site growth, ahead of previously dominant contenders.
That scale brings responsibility. Backwards compatibility and extensive QA are essential because WordPress sites vary widely in themes, plugins, server environments, and PHP versions. Elementor v4 is a major rewrite of a decade-old codebase; migrating between versions will require careful planning. Expect coexistence between older sites staying on previous releases and new content adopting v4 for a transitional period. To support big engineering efforts like v4, Elementor has grown to about 350 employees, allowing for larger engineering, QA, and product teams.
AI became a primary focus in 2025 and into 2026. Miriam outlined several AI strategies Elementor is pursuing:
– In-editor AI: Tools inside the Elementor editor that generate images and copy for common content tasks — headlines, body text, images — streamlining content creation.
– Angie: A free, standalone WordPress plugin that brings agentic AI to site management beyond the Elementor editor. Angie exposes tools that can create posts, manage users, change categories, and handle WooCommerce products and ACF fields. The team built around 200 tools and extended support to popular integrations so Angie can act across many workflows. Angie includes guardrails and safety checks and is available for users to install and test.
– Site Planner: A conversational AI workflow that moves users from idea to wireframe. Instead of a single prompt, Site Planner asks clarifying questions, drafts a brief, generates a sitemap with content suggestions, and produces near-complete wireframes (roughly 80–90% of the work). Users can tweak structure, drag-and-drop pages, change palettes, upload logos, and export to hosting — Elementor’s hosting, a connected account, or as a ZIP. Site Planner is aimed at both beginners and professionals to speed research, client sign-off, and the initial design phase.
Integration with WordPress’s evolving Abilities API is an important focus. Angie was built before that API stabilized, so Elementor created its own system to expose WordPress capabilities. That work covers many cases beyond the initial Abilities API scope, and the plan is to align with and use the Abilities API as it matures. Miriam praised the Abilities API as a useful standard that helps agentic AI interact with WordPress consistently, avoiding fragmented, plugin-specific implementations and improving long-term compatibility.
A key takeaway is that agentic AI, which can act at the site level (create, publish, manage users, edit WooCommerce items), is now realistic and valuable. This moves AI beyond content generation into full site management and workflow automation. That capability opens many productive possibilities but also introduces new complexities around debugging and responsibility: interactions between multiple AI-driven plugins, Elementor, WordPress core, and third-party extensions will create novel support challenges.
Site Planner’s flow starts with a prompt but then asks targeted questions, scores the resulting brief, produces a sitemap showing page hierarchy and content chunks, and assembles page structures populated with generated content and common components like testimonials, galleries, forms, and events. Outputs are editable and can be published or exported; currently projects remain private until exported or published, with deeper integration planned so users can duplicate and regenerate projects within Elementor.
Looking forward, Miriam expects AI to gain much finer control. Today’s tools assemble structures and content; future integrations aim to let AI make granular design changes — custom code snippets, widget adjustments, precise styling tweaks — acting like a collaborative design partner. Users could request iterative changes conversationally (swap images, adjust padding, apply shadows) and have the system implement them, shifting creators from hands-on tinkering to directing outcomes.
Miriam stresses that human roles will change but remain essential. AI accelerates work and raises baseline quality, but humans must define direction. Human-in-the-loop thinking — strategy, UX judgment, domain expertise — will determine what makes an excellent site. Skill will shift from manual execution to framing, directing, and evaluating AI-driven outputs.
Safety and support remain priorities. Early Angie tests could perform destructive actions without sufficient confirmation, so the team added protections and checkpoints. Support workflows will evolve: AI can help generate logs and analyze issues, but diagnosing interactions among multiple AI agents and plugins will be a harder variant of traditional plugin conflict resolution. Determining the root cause — whether Elementor, Angie, core WordPress, or a third-party plugin — will require new tools and processes.
On accessibility, Miriam warned AI is no silver bullet. Commands like “make my site accessible” lack the specificity and measurable standards needed. Elementor created Ally, an accessibility plugin that scans sites, reports issues, suggests fixes, and can apply AI-assisted changes. Ally helps iteratively improve accessibility, but full compliance still requires careful processes and human oversight.
Miriam is optimistic about 2026. AI has reignited innovation across WordPress, enabling capabilities that were previously out of reach. She expects many creative releases from Elementor and the broader ecosystem, along with challenges for builders, support teams, and agencies adapting to new tools. Despite rapid change, she believes AI will be a powerful amplifier when guided by skilled humans.
The conversation ended on a pragmatic note: the pace of AI development is fast and uncertain, and it will reshape development, design, and site management. Still, human judgment, strategy, and expertise remain central to defining quality on the web.