Miriam Schwab, Head of WordPress at Elementor, joins the Jukebox Podcast to reflect on her two decades in the WordPress ecosystem, Elementor’s rise, and the company’s AI strategy.
Background
Miriam discovered WordPress about 20 years ago, grew an agency specializing in custom WordPress work, and later founded Strattic, a startup that published WordPress sites as static while retaining dynamic features. Strattic solved many speed, security, and scalability issues, raised VC funding, and was acquired by Elementor in June 2022. Miriam led the Strattic team before taking on a role as Elementor’s Head of WordPress, acting as liaison between Elementor and the broader WordPress community.
Elementor’s growth and responsibility
Elementor launched ten years ago and rapidly gained adoption thanks to a strong free product and a useful paid tier. According to W3Techs data Miriam references, Elementor’s share of the entire web grew during 2025 from around 11.7% to over 13.1%, making it one of the fastest-growing CMS-like technologies that year. Elementor now supports a massive and diverse set of sites, and Miriam emphasizes the centrality of backward compatibility and thorough QA for every release. Major upgrades—such as the forthcoming v4—represent deep codebase overhauls; they bring value but must coexist with older site implementations, so migration strategies and careful development are critical. Elementor’s team has grown substantially (around 350 employees), reflecting the scale of work required.
Elementor’s multi-pronged AI strategy
Miriam outlines three main AI approaches Elementor is pursuing:
1) In-editor generative tools
Elementor has added expected AI features inside the editor: image generation, copywriting assistance, and other content creation helpers. These are useful building blocks, becoming perceived as standard capabilities by users.
2) Angie — an agentic WordPress AI plugin
Angie is a standalone plugin that brings agentic AI capabilities across WordPress, not limited to Elementor. Angie can manage many site tasks: content creation, user and product management (including WooCommerce), scheduling, category changes, and more. The team built an initial suite of roughly 200 “tools” exposing WordPress capabilities to Angie, and also integrated common plugins like WooCommerce and ACF. Angie provides guardrails and confirmations to avoid destructive actions. It is free and open for feedback while continuing to evolve.
3) Site Planner — conversational site creation
Site Planner is a conversational AI that guides users from a concept to a wireframed site. Rather than relying on a single prompt, it asks iterative clarifying and suggestive questions, builds a brief and a sitemap, and generates page-structured content and wireframes—what Miriam describes as taking a user from zero to ~80–90% of a site. Users can tweak content chunks, rearrange the sitemap, change palettes, upload logos, and export or publish the generated site to Elementor hosting or another host. Site Planner is especially valuable for non-professionals who don’t know what to ask, and for professionals who want to accelerate research and client sign-off with a concrete starting site.
Abilities API and standards
Miriam highlights the importance of the WordPress Abilities API as a standard way to expose what a site can do to AI agents. Elementor’s Angie team began building capabilities before the Abilities API existed, creating their own tools to expose WordPress features. They aim to sync with and leverage the Abilities API, and are in dialogue with WordPress AI teams to resolve integration issues. The Abilities API is seen as crucial: it standardizes interactions between AI and the many plugins and legacy code in WordPress, making AI-driven workflows more consistent and future-proof.
AI’s impact on roles, creativity, and support
Miriam stresses that AI will change workflows rather than eliminate the need for human expertise. AI accelerates production and can raise quality, but it still requires direction. The value of humans will shift toward higher-level roles—strategist, director, or creative lead—where guiding AI and evaluating outcomes are essential. Designers and developers will need to adapt, focusing more on conceptual and quality-control work than on repetitive tasks.
Support and safety considerations
AI introduces new support complexities. Angie and other AI tools need strong guardrails (confirmations, undo options, permission checks) to avoid destructive actions (Miriam recounts an early incident where Angie removed her user). At the same time, AI can improve support: it can analyze documentation and logs to surface relevant troubleshooting steps, but diagnosing multi-agent conflicts—where multiple AI tools or plugins interact—can be harder and raises a new dimension of “plugin conflict” problems.
Accessibility
Elementor has produced Ally, an accessibility plugin for all WordPress sites, which analyzes a site, points out issues, suggests fixes, and can use AI to implement solutions. Accessibility remains a nontrivial task: AI alone doesn’t automatically guarantee accessible sites; it needs tools, direction, and ongoing checks. Ally aims to make accessibility improvements more actionable and continuous.
Outlook
Miriam is optimistic that AI reinvigorates innovation in WordPress. She acknowledges the ecosystem was slow to adopt AI relative to some proprietary platforms, but the recent rapid progress—standardization with the Abilities API and tools like Angie and Site Planner—positions WordPress to benefit from and contribute to AI-driven site creation and management. She anticipates 2026 will see rapid change and many new tools and integrations that further expand what WordPress can do.
Conclusion
Elementor is balancing rapid growth, careful product evolution, and a broad AI push across editor enhancements, agentic site management (Angie), and conversational site creation (Site Planner). The company is working to align its own tooling with WordPress-wide standards like the Abilities API while investing in guardrails, accessibility, and support improvements. Miriam believes AI will shift how people create and manage sites—requiring new skills and approaches—while offering significant opportunities to make WordPress more powerful and accessible.