Miriam Schwab, Head of WordPress at Elementor, spoke with the WP Tavern Jukebox Podcast about her two-decade journey in the WordPress world, Elementor’s rapid expansion, and the company’s multi‑faceted approach to AI.
Background and role
Miriam traced her career from offering WordPress as a managed service and running an agency for tech and nonprofit clients, to founding Strattic, which published WordPress sites as static architectures while keeping dynamic features. Strattic addressed speed, security, and scalability, raised venture capital, and was acquired by Elementor in June 2022. After leading the Strattic team, Miriam became Elementor’s Head of WordPress, serving as a bridge between the company and the broader WordPress community across strategy, product, partnerships, and community relations.
Scale, responsibility, and growth
Elementor launched ten years ago with a robust free tier and a pro offering that drove adoption. Miriam noted continued growth into 2025: W3Techs reported Elementor’s ecosystem moving from about 11.7% to 13.1% of the web. That reach brings benefits and responsibilities — particularly around backward compatibility and quality assurance — because WordPress sites vary widely in themes, plugins, hosting, and PHP versions. To support a broad product surface, Elementor has grown to roughly 350 employees focused on development, QA, and support.
A major codebase overhaul: v4
Elementor is preparing v4, a significant modernization of a decade‑old codebase. Miriam emphasized the complexity of migrating so many real-world sites: not every page can convert instantly, so v4 and the legacy system must interoperate for a transition period. The team is investing heavily in QA, migration tools, and staged rollouts to balance innovation with site stability.
Elementor’s AI strategy
Elementor is pursuing AI on several fronts:
– In‑editor AI: Text and image generation features are already embedded into the editor to speed content and creative workflows.
– Angie: A free, standalone plugin that provides agentic AI for broader WordPress site management — creating posts, managing users and products, scheduling, and administrative tasks. Angie was built with many integrations (around 200 tools) and connections to popular plugins such as WooCommerce and ACF. The team expects to map these capabilities to the WordPress Abilities API as it matures.
– Site Planner: A conversational tool that turns an idea into a wireframed site. It asks clarifying questions, produces a brief, outlines a sitemap and content chunks, and generates wireframes roughly 80–90% complete. Users can refine content, structure, and styles, then export or download a package. Site Planner is designed to shorten discovery, reduce blank‑canvas friction, and accelerate agency workflows.
Abilities API and interoperability
Miriam praised the Abilities API as a crucial step toward standardizing how AI agents interact with WordPress capabilities. Given WordPress’s legacy and extensibility, a unified abilities layer will help agents perform site actions more reliably across diverse plugins and configurations. Elementor is aligning its internal integrations with core AI efforts so tools like Angie can interoperate with broader WP ecosystems.
How AI changes work and the need for humans
AI is becoming a practical team member for content creation, rapid prototyping, and iteration. Miriam stressed that human direction, curation, and strategy remain essential: AI raises the baseline and speeds execution, but humans decide quality, meaning, and final choices. The human in the loop will shift from manual execution to oversight, refinement, and domain expertise.
Support, guardrails, and safety
Agentic AI introduces new support and safety challenges. Miriam shared an early test where Angie removed her user, underlining the need for firm guardrails. Elementor is implementing confirmations, undo capabilities, traceable logs, and safety checks. Support systems must evolve to diagnose multi‑actor conflicts when AI tools and third‑party plugins interact, but AI can also improve support by surfacing relevant documentation and suggested repairs.
Accessibility and AI
AI is not a silver bullet for accessibility. Elementor developed Ally, an accessibility plugin that audits sites, highlights issues, suggests fixes, and can apply corrective actions with AI assistance. The goal is continuous, manageable improvement rather than claims of perfect compliance.
Product direction and outlook
Site Planner currently lives outside the core editor, but Elementor plans to fold more of its features into the Elementor/WordPress environment, enabling duplication, regeneration, and multiple iterations inside the product. v4 and deeper AI integration aim to enable more granular, creative, and code‑level outputs such as custom snippets, widgets, and advanced styling driven by AI when appropriate.
Miriam is optimistic about 2026 and beyond: AI can reignite innovation across the WordPress ecosystem, lower barriers for advanced capabilities, and help WordPress remain competitive with proprietary platforms. Immediate priorities are rolling out responsible AI tooling, aligning with WordPress core efforts like the Abilities API, and continuing to shoulder the responsibilities of serving a significant portion of the web.
The conversation framed a dual challenge for the ecosystem: unlock powerful, agentic AI experiences while ensuring sites remain safe, accessible, and reliable. AI will accelerate and often improve many tasks, but human oversight, strategy, and judgment will be more important than ever.