Miriam Schwab, Head of WordPress at Elementor, reflects on her two decades in the WordPress ecosystem, Elementor’s rapid expansion, and the company’s approach to AI.
From agency work to acquisition
Miriam first encountered WordPress about 20 years ago, building a career on custom WordPress projects and eventually founding Strattic, a startup that published WordPress sites as static while preserving dynamic functionality. Strattic addressed speed, security, and scaling challenges, secured VC funding, and was acquired by Elementor in June 2022. After leading the Strattic team, Miriam moved into the Head of WordPress role at Elementor, serving as a bridge between the company and the broader WordPress community.
Scale, compatibility, and responsibility
Elementor launched ten years ago, growing quickly thanks to a solid free editor and a valuable paid tier. Citing W3Techs data, Miriam notes that Elementor’s share of websites increased in 2025 from roughly 11.7% to over 13.1%, making it one of the fastest-growing CMS-like technologies that year. With that scale comes responsibility: backward compatibility and rigorous QA are core principles. Major platform upgrades, like the forthcoming v4, require deep code changes but must coexist with older site implementations, so careful migration strategies and conservative release practices are essential. The company has expanded its team to roughly 350 employees to meet the demands of supporting a diverse ecosystem.
A three-pronged AI approach
Elementor’s AI work follows three complementary paths:
1) In-editor generative features
Elementor has embedded generative tools into the editor—image creation, copy assistance, and other content helpers—that behave like expected building blocks. These features streamline content creation and are quickly becoming standard editor capabilities.
2) Angie: an agentic WordPress AI plugin
Angie is a standalone, agentic AI plugin designed to operate across WordPress, not just within Elementor. It can handle a wide range of tasks: drafting content, managing users and products (including WooCommerce), scheduling, adjusting categories, and more. The team implemented roughly 200 “tools” to expose WordPress capabilities to Angie and integrated common plugins such as WooCommerce and ACF. Angie includes guardrails—confirmations, permission checks, and undo options—to prevent destructive actions. It’s available for free as it evolves, with ongoing user feedback shaping development.
3) Site Planner: conversational site creation
Site Planner is a guided, conversational flow that takes an idea and turns it into a wireframed site. Instead of a single prompt, it asks iterative clarifying questions, produces a brief and sitemap, generates structured page content and wireframes, and reaches roughly 80–90% of a finished site that users can refine. Users can edit content blocks, reorganize the sitemap, change color palettes, upload assets, and then export or publish to Elementor hosting or other hosts. This tool helps non-professionals who don’t know what to ask and helps professionals accelerate research and client sign-offs.
Standards: Abilities API and interoperability
Miriam emphasizes the importance of the WordPress Abilities API as a standardized way for AI agents to understand what a site can do. Elementor’s team began building Angie before the Abilities API existed, creating its own tools to expose site capabilities. They are now aligning with the Abilities API and collaborating with WordPress AI teams to resolve integration issues. Standardizing interactions between AI and the vast variety of plugins and legacy code in WordPress is seen as essential for consistent, future-proof AI-driven workflows.
How AI will change roles and workflows
Rather than replacing people, Miriam predicts AI will change workflows and elevate the importance of human judgment. AI can accelerate production and improve quality, but it still needs direction. Human roles will shift toward strategic, creative, and oversight responsibilities—designers and developers will focus more on concept, quality control, and high-level decisions instead of repetitive tasks.
Support, safety, and multi-agent complexity
AI introduces new support challenges. Strong guardrails are critical to avoid harmful actions—Miriam recounts an early incident when Angie removed her user—to highlight the need for confirmations and rollback. AI can enhance support by analyzing docs and logs to suggest fixes, but diagnosing conflicts between multiple AI agents or plugins can create a new class of “plugin conflict” problems, complicating troubleshooting.
Accessibility efforts
Elementor has released Ally, an accessibility plugin for WordPress that analyzes sites, highlights issues, recommends fixes, and can leverage AI to implement some solutions. However, accessibility is nuanced: AI alone doesn’t guarantee accessible sites. Ongoing checks, clear tools, and human direction remain necessary to produce and maintain accessibility.
Outlook
Miriam is optimistic about AI reinvigorating innovation in WordPress. The ecosystem was slower than some proprietary platforms to adopt AI, but recent progress—standardization via the Abilities API and tools like Angie and Site Planner—positions WordPress to both benefit from and contribute to AI-driven site creation and management. She expects rapid change and many new integrations in 2026 that expand what WordPress can do.
Summary
Elementor is balancing rapid growth, careful product evolution, and a broad AI push across editor enhancements, agentic site management with Angie, and conversational site design via Site Planner. The company is aligning its tooling with WordPress-wide standards, investing in safety and accessibility, and preparing for shifted skill needs as AI changes how sites are built and managed.