Miriam Schwab joins Luke and Jonathan to discuss the Elementor ecosystem, what other product companies can learn from its growth, and how Elementor thinks about its relationship with the wider WordPress project. Luke asks a question about dependency, Jonathan geeks out about ecosystem thinking, and Miriam welcomes ideas from listeners.

Transcript#

Luke:
Miriam, I remember the first time we met in person, must’ve been 2015 and I was visiting Israel with my wife and young kids and I reached out to you because everybody knows that Miriam Schwab is Miss WordPress in Israel. And so I said, oh, is there any WordPress meetups that I could attend? And you graciously invited me and our and the family to celebrate Yom Ha’atzmaut, Israel’s Independence Day, which my son referred to and we still refer lovingly to as Yom Ha’atzmai’ut. And we met up and had a barbecue together.

Miriam:
I very much remember that. The way I kind of remember it is I think you posted something on Twitter. I might be misremembering, but this is how it goes. You posted on Twitter something like, we’re going to Israel, does anyone know anyone from the WordPress community in Israel? And a bunch of people said, Miriam, Miriam, Miriam, right? It was like something like that. And you’re like, well, I guess it’s Miriam. So you reached out and you’re coming around Yom Ha’atzmaut, Independence Day, and I was like, well, we have like a barbecue type thing. I’m guessing that’s what we did that day. You guys want to come? I was so excited to connect with you. Its exciting that someone from the community was just coming to visit. And yeah, and we got to host you guys. And then that was the first time we met.

Luke:
Yeah, a lot has happened in your WordPress journey since then. I remember at the time you were running an agency.

Miriam:
Yeah, that’s right. think I was running the agency and it was ⁓ right before I… well, it was 2015. It was like pretty close to when I sold it and I started working on Stratic. ⁓ I probably at that time hadn’t… I wonder if I had even thought of Stratic when you came. I don’t know if I had yet. And ⁓ yeah, and then that’s where my journey went after that. But your journey also has been interesting since then.

Luke:
Well, yeah, it’s been tied up a lot with yours, hasn’t it? And we keep ⁓ seeing each other and weaving in and out of each other’s lives at various different things. I’ve done some contract work for you. I joined as a member of Stratic and then Stratic was acquired by Elementor, which was exciting. And you’ve continued on at Elementor. ⁓ Big company life wasn’t for me and I moved on.

But yeah, it’s been good. And we see each other at WordCamps all the time. And so it’s nice to have you on the show to discuss, well, I thought we could discuss community, the WordPress community, because that is really your area of expertise. You go to just about every WordCamp in the world, I reckon.

Miriam:
I don’t go to every work camp in the world. I go to the flagships, but I don’t go all of them. And one of the main reasons is because they’re all on the weekend, which is Shabbat. And it is hard enough for me that two out of the three of the flagship conferences take place over the weekend, over Shabbat. I go and I do the best I can while I’m there, but it’s obviously not ideal.

But those I have to go to and I want to go to them. Yeah, it’s not just like I’m forced to. It’s important to me and I want to be there and I want to be part of those community events. But I basically don’t add any other events to my annual schedule that take place over the weekend because that’s enough for me. But also I was talking to someone in the office today actually about that and how ⁓ other, it’s not just about keeping Shabbat. Like I don’t know why these conferences still take place on the weekend.

People don’t want to work on the weekend and if they are going to a WordCamp it means they’re basically working like for two weeks straight until the next time they get a break to be at home with their family, with their loved ones, with their friends and not be working. Anyways, but yeah, so I don’t go to all the WordCamps but last year I did travel to nine different events and for me that was a lot.

Jonathan:
Man, I’ve struggled with the same thing over the years. For many years, that’s a big reason why I didn’t go to the WordCamps because they’re on the weekend. I don’t work on Saturday. And it’s also that time away from family.

And it’s ⁓ I’ve really appreciated the efforts with WordCamp US in particular lately to move into the week. And there seems to be a recognition of that, which I’m happy to see. I think our community takes the experience of individuals like the meetups make a lot of sense to be something that’s more casual. But at the WordCamp level, especially the global level, most people that are attending are doing this professionally. And I know it’s easier said than done, but I’ve been happy to see more progress there. Your experience just reminds me of that. It can end up making it inadvertently less accessible to people who, yeah, this is what they do already..

Luke:
Yeah. I’ve been invited and as I’m sure you have Miriam to speak at WordCamp Asia, but it’s, it’s like right on the end of Pesach and it’s, I don’t know if I’m going to be able to make it, but ⁓ I guess I’ve just like put that in a, in the basket of that’s just how it is in this, in this world. But I too, you know, we’re this, we should level up, right? It’s a professional outfit. There’s WordPress stuff. Why does that happen have to happen on the weekend?

Miriam:
So I understand like that they can’t take everyone’s individual needs into account that would be insane and everyone has you know, they like I don’t know conditions, criteria, needs, and whatever so it’s fine that they’re not taking my needs into account here ⁓ But like I said, it’s not just about Shabbat or whatever people want their weekends. It’s a large-scale, high production event that’s for the global community to come together and it really does end up working out that we’re like working for two weeks straight. On the other hand, when I’ve brought up this topic, I have heard the other side, which is that a lot of people still are involved in WordPress and it’s not their main job. like their employer wouldn’t necessarily authorize them to go or take time off for it. And so this is how they can be involved. But I really wonder what the ratio is of those people to professionals at this point. And with regards to Passover holiday, also, like, I mean, we have so many holidays. You know that there’s a website. It’s like, yeah..

Luke:
Yeah, that’s a bit tough. But also like there’s always such a huge Israeli turnout to WordCamp Asia in particular.

Miriam:
Is there though? Like ⁓ there’s us and even us when we come, our team isn’t all from Israel. We have like, for example, at WordCamp Asia.. tThis is probably what the breakdown is going to be something like four of us from Israel and three or four from India. ⁓ you know, and, then how many other Israelis are there? There’s really not that many. ⁓ I was there.

Luke:
Yeah, I remember in Bangkok there were tons.

Miriam:
⁓ What always surprises me though is ⁓ yeah, no it could be. What surprises me is the kosher table of meals. I always figure it’s like me, you, and maybe one or two other people, but there’s always quite a lot of meals there and I’m like, who else is keeping kosher?

Luke:
That’s my memory. It’s not just Elementor. Yeah, all those secret WordPress Jews come out of hiding.

Jonathan:
There’s also folks like sometimes if I’m in a like I don’t typically like eat kosher. But sometimes I feel like okay this is the best choice in an area where I’m like I don’t it’s yeah.

Miriam:
Yeah, maybe that’s why people are choosing it. I know, like, I think this is how it worked out at, think it was in Portland, ⁓ at least on Contributor Day. So they had a cart for the special meals. And what they did was they had kosher meals for the kosher people and halal because kosher covers halal, not the opposite. Yeah. And so we were all standing in line together to get the meals. ⁓

Jonathan:
I remember that. Yep.

Miriam:
So that also might be why there’s more kosher meals than I would expect. But it is what it is. I mean, I don’t know if you remember last year, I think it was in Switzerland. It came out on the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Fitr, which is they only have two. They have two major holidays, not like us. We have like 12, but they have two Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha, I think, or hader or both. Sorry, I should know. But ⁓ and it was actually on WordCamp so a lot of Muslims couldn’t come but like it is hard to make the calendar work for all all the scenarios and all the things so you know we make most of it but I do hope that one day WordCamps will start taking place more during the week and then I would be very happy to go to more of them.

Jonathan:
Yeah, I’m hoping for the same as well. Miriam, you’ve been in this community for a long time and you’ve also had a lot of professional context and lots of different hats that you’ve worn. So one of my favorite topics to touch on sort of related to this is like ecosystem thinking. And when I think about Elementor in particular, I don’t know of any other like, I don’t know of any other like what I would describe as like a sub ecosystem that’s as big as Elementor.

Elementor is massive and continues to grow significantly. And I’m curious for your thoughts on this as someone who you’ve been an Elementor now for a good chunk of time, so you know it well, but you also are connected to the larger WordPress community. And I’m curious, like how does sort of its size and scale, and it really is an ecosystem in and of itself, right? Like there’s so much to it. like, how does that affect how you guys think when you’re making decisions. Because your decisions in ways that are very similar to WordPress can have all these second order or third order effects, right? When you decide to put something into the product or not. I’m curious if there’s any perspective that you can share on how big Elementor is, how does that affect how you make decisions at the company.

Miriam:
Elementor is quite large and has a large scale. last numbers that I checked were something like 30.8 % of WordPress sites right now and 13.1 % of all websites. So the scale is…

Luke:
Wow. Yeah, I looked up in advance the number of plugins on the WordPress repo that just include the word Elementor. It doesn’t count all those that don’t have Elementor in the title and it’s 6% of plugins have Elementor in the title.

Miriam:
That’s crazy. That’s a lot. We definitely have, I mean, the number that I heard in terms of the number of add-ons specifically for Elementor is a thousand. I’m not exactly sure where that number comes from, just that number that’s like products that are specifically oriented to Elementor users, it’s boggles the mind. You’re probably like, Elementor again?

Luke:
I think I’ve reviewed more than that. Yeah.

Miriam:
But by the way, another ⁓ plugin that has ⁓ a large ecosystem is WooCommerce. WooCommerce also has a lot of extensions and add-ons that created for it. But in terms of how we think of it, ⁓ first of all, from the beginning, Elementor was developed so that it had the hooks and filters ready for developers to create add-ons. So it was primed to have an ecosystem developed around it. I don’t know if the founders in the company at the time expected it to you know, be used so widely, but that was a core part of creating Elementor. ⁓ And I think that’s worked out pretty well because you have an enthusiastic group of people around it.

Jonathan:
Well, and part of why I asked this, you referenced WooCommerce. WooCommerce is one of the other largest like sub ecosystems within WordPress. And I’ve seen at this point how WooCommerce has also had an influence on some of the project itself, right? Where it’s like some of the admin work that’s been done, like was pioneered in WooCommerce. And in similar vein, something I haven’t paid as much attention to, I’m curious if there’s any insight that you can share. But like when I think about Elementor as an ecosystem, it’s massive in its scale and its influence, either direct or indirect on the project, right?

If it’s like close to 30% of folks on WordPress are using Elementor, then like for many of them, Elementor is the WordPress that they know. So to me, if they’re part of what I think about is if there’s lessons that Elementor has learned about how you wield that influence or how you think about the ecosystem, that’s valid for the project itself to be learning from and also thinking about. Elementor is a company, and the way that you think about things is going to be different from a project. But you guys are also involved in the project itself. So I look at this from the outside as like, man, there must be some lessons to be learned. Because it’s a massive amount of growth that we have a few examples in the space, WooCommerce being another good one, but not too many. It’s quite unique.

Miriam:
Yeah, I mean Elementor is the most popular plugin in the repo and ⁓ the scale, I think, in terms of numbers and percentages is the largest. Elementor, aside from technically from the beginning being primed for ⁓ extensions and things like that, there was from the start a transparency around communication with the user base and a high level of engagement with them to get feedback and truly listen to it. We have frustrated users who say, you don’t listen to us, but like, I mean, just think about how many people are telling us stuff, you know, and talk about specific needs. But from the beginning and until today, the team takes user feedback extremely seriously and listens.

When I joined Elementor.. So, Luke, you said a big time company was like that wasn’t for you. I also thought it wasn’t going to be for me. I was like, this is a different world. Right? But I found my place there and it worked out. But I totally get you. ⁓ So when I joined and I saw how much they pay attention to users and how much they take it to heart, like, you know, the company, the company’s growth, even from three and a half years ago when I joined every year, it’s just.

When I joined, it wasn’t yet the most popular plugin in the repo. And then it bypassed Yoast and Contact Form 7. And then there was, and it stayed there. So the growth has been just crazy. But even so, the team will be like, take it to heart if someone says something negative and, you know, and they care. And I think that direct connection to users, I don’t know if it will always lead to growth. It’s not like this is the key and if you do it, then everything’s going to be great. You know, you also, there’s a lot of things that have to come into play like product market fit timing. I think Elementor’s timing when it came on the scene was like perfect. It was like a perfect storm.

Great marketing, from the start, the team has had great marketing capabilities. A very strong brand, like pink, you know, us, we’re very pink. I think all these things come together, but the direct connection and voice and listening to the user, I think has played a very important role in its growth.

Luke:
Yeah. And how much do you think that listening, that voice is engagement with the community, like brand engagement with the community? Cause that’s essentially your role is in it, Miriam, to be that spokesperson from Elementor to engage with the community. And, I know that there’s a bunch of contributors that Elementor sponsors, including me. And there’s just a lot of WordPress community involvement. So do you think that in general is good advice for up and comers in the plugin ecosystem? And how do you manage that as you grow and try to scale with like the amount of investment that’s involved in contributing in that way?

Miriam:
Its a very good question. For Elementor, specifically, it matters that the company has a face that is accessible. And let’s say a lot of people know, feel comfortable with, feel friendly with. So that happens to be me in this situation. But because Elementor is based on and works with WordPress and the WordPress project is its own world. It’s not necessarily Elementor’s world. And that was something that Elementor had to figure out, like how to ⁓ engage with the broader WordPress community that not only may not be using Elementor, but also often doesn’t like Elementor. And that’s…

From our perspective, that doesn’t matter. Like, you don’t have to like us, but we want to be here and to collaborate with you if it’s relevant to you and to contribute however we can in a way that’s hopefully useful in bringing value to the project. And if you, you might not like us, but because of our reach, if you have a product, your users, ⁓ a big chunk of them are going to be using Elementor. It just is the way it is. There are certain companies in the space that definitely would rather their users were not using Elementor, but they are because they like it. So then we need to have a relationship so that together we can make sure that our shared users are having a good experience.

Jonathan:
There’s some interesting parallels to early WordPress. Like there were developers and folks who definitely resisted WordPress early on, but users were like, we like it. Like we want to use this. I remember some of my early enterprise sales, the frustration that internal devs would express, but the folks were like, well, this is what we want to use. Executives were making that decision.

It’s really interesting because I could see how you, if you just listen to the community where you guys are investing and you’re actively involved, ⁓ that would not be representative of the Elementor base, right? Of how many folks are actually using it. And if I think back to my experience with Elementor over the years and seeing some of the, like the Facebook groups or the Reddit, like the different places where there are very passionate users of Elementor, that advocate for it. And for them, like Elementor and WordPress is a kind of synonymous. I could see how easy it would be if I was in Elementor’s shoes to just hear a vocal minority and lose track of the much larger ⁓ majority that’s actually using Elementor and having success with it. ⁓

And it sounds like you figured out like, Hey, it’s valuable to have that input from the community. We also have to remember we have just a much larger base to be thinking about that goes beyond what we’re hearing.

Miriam:
Yeah, you know, complainers, there’s a saying, something like the squeaky wheel that makes the most noise, something like that. the complainers are the loudest and you can think that they represent everyone or a lot of people. But then you look at our numbers and you hear the complainers and they’re saying, oh, Elementor this and Elementor that. But then we have, I mean, I think in 2025, we three and a half million new Elementor sites were created.

Jonathan:
Yeah, that’s crazy.

Miriam:
So I don’t know who those people are, but they are using it and they’re happy with it and they’re not complaining. So we don’t hear them. But one of the nice things for me after joining Elementor and I originally was a WordPress purist.. I didn’t use Elementor in my projects or websites. ⁓ And so I had to, you know, learn about Elementor and start to see it from a different perspective.

One of the things that helped me was going to the WordCamps on Elementor’s behalf. We have a booth, it’s very visible, it’s very pink. And just throughout the camp, people are coming to the booth to tell us how much they love us and how much ⁓ it’s their power tool and even how it’s changed their lives and allowed them to set up businesses. And those messages that we hear in person, they’re not complaining and yelling online, but they are living their life and building their projects and building a business around Elementor and they appreciate it and love it. That’s who we’re building for.

Luke:
Does Elementor find it difficult to keep up with the pace of change in WordPress? I’m specifically thinking of WordPress 7 with the admin redesign, which is happening to bring WordPress more in line with the block editor. And of course that’s essentially what Elementor is doing here is replacing the block editor. And so I wonder if there’s a tension there around the redesign or if Elementor is getting any updates or anything along those lines to try to better match in with what WordPress is, the direction that WordPress is headed in. Well, maybe we’ll just get a big pink admin redesign from Elementor.

Miriam:
That’s what everyone’s waiting for. No, I’m kidding. So we’re keeping an eye on it. And that is one of the least of our concerns. I don’t know if you’ve seen, but we are about to release V4, what we’re calling V4, version four of the editor, which is like a refactor and rethinking how page building works with Elementor.

It’s bringing modern practices to the page builder. We’re calling it atomic development. Things are much more easy to manage also in a scalable way. And this was a humongous project. People are seeing it now. I think we started working on it like at least a year and a half, two years ago. So you asked about how do we take into consideration the size of our ecosystem? Imagine working on a product that it’s not just necessarily a simple upgrade because it’s rebuilding the way pages are going to be built is very different. So just even considering that, how do you make sure backwards compatibility, terrifying, while bringing modern ways of doing things and forward thinking ways of doing things to our users? And so actually the team did something amazing and wild, which is that you get both in Elementor. The next version of Elementor is going to have a like V4 is being rolled out like in parts. So like more and more components and widgets and things like that are V4 widgets. But you basically have both in the editor in parallel. And so you have pages that were built in V3. That’s fine or previous. And then if you want to do new stuff with before you can and trying to make sure that even just our own product is living in harmony.

So that’s the main focus ⁓ for the page builder right now. And ⁓ in any case, Elementor kind of lives in its own environment within WordPress. WordPress, you know, ⁓ it’s great that they’re upgrading the admin and hopefully that will make it more appealing and user-friendly for like new users. It’s amazing. I don’t think it really overlaps there ⁓ in terms of how we’re structuring things, but yeah.

Jonathan:
Man, there’s so much that I think about here. One of the things that, because yeah, for many folks who use Elementor, it effectively is its own experience, right? I’m hearing you describe what the WordPress project itself went through in a different way with Gutenberg sort of coming early on, right? There’s a new editor experience, like how do you think about that? But in some ways, I see your challenge as even more challenging because the folks that are using Elementor are specifically, like they’ve opted in to use Elementor, like within the WordPress ecosystem. they’re going to be like there with the WordPress editor. I think there was a little bit more of a luxury for a while there where it’s like, okay, you can still use the classic editor or you can kind of use the new thing, but it had a long period of time that it was able to work on it where in your case, it’s going be interesting to see how that gets rolled out.

And what stands out to me, I remember a few years ago when I was working on the Web Almanac project, I started to see Elementor in the data then. And it was already growing at a wild pace. It was a big deal. And it began to stand out to me then of, man, I feel like we’re overlooking - we as in the small community of WordPress - we’re overlooking just how impactful this product over here is. And that’s only grown ever since.

Maybe that’s gotten a lot better. But to me, think we humans tend to be slow to catch up on things. And when I look at this now, I’m like, man, a third of WordPress running on Elementor, there is, so to your answer to Luke’s question, it sounds like you guys are doing best by your users, right? Like you’re paying attention to what’s coming and you’re gonna, you know, that’s all good. Like you’re gonna make sure that the Elementor folks are having a good experience. You’re focused on this transition to v4. There’s a lot to do to keep you busy.

Part of what stands out to me is what else can we as an ecosystem and WordPress more broadly be learning from what Elementor is doing? And my question for you is like, do you feel like people are paying more attention now? Is there more of a ⁓ curiosity and interest in learning? Because to me, that would be a big miss for folks to not just be paying attention to like what is going on with Elementor?

Miriam:
I don’t get asked a lot about how we do what we do and what led to the company’s growth and continued growth. Even in comparison to other plugins in the repo, which I think the plugins are a critical part of our ecosystem, from what we have understood, we are one of the few plugins that’s continuing to grow at a significant pace, and God willing, we’ll continue that way. But maybe it’s because of the preconceived notions or the perspective of Elementor being like, not professional enough or like an add-on and it’s not the real deal and whatever it is that people how people see things which is fine it doesn’t take them to that next level of saying ⁓ that’s interesting you know I might not love your product I might not identify with it I might not choose it but there must be something to learn from you and actually I almost never have conversations like that

Jonathan:
Man, so I’ve had the pleasure of working with Tammie Lister over the years. And one of the things that she taught me that stood out to me is WordPress, when the new editor came in, the vision wasn’t just to have a single editor that did all the things. Tammie has opened my eyes to a world of having multiple editors that do different jobs and that solve a different set of problems here and there.

And I think about that, Elementor seems like such a great example of it’s clearly solving a set of problems for its users and giving them the experience. It’s helping them get the thing that they’re wanting done. So at least to me, it’s like, man, what, what an op like you’ve already shared a few things. There was the focus on users early on, which is not to be taken for granted. Like that, that feedback loop and figure out, Hey, what works for you? A lot of products could draw inspiration from just that alone, but having that clear positioning is another part of it. It’s something we see with a lot of WordPress products where they don’t have that clear positioning. They struggle with like, okay, what’s the message? It’s not just about the color pink, which helps, but there’s a bigger like, hey, we’re here to help you get this thing done. At least to me, if I’m ⁓ a product in the ecosystem and wanting to grow, there’s so much to be learned from what Elementor does, let alone thinking about Elementor itself as an ecosystem to grow into. I think both apply and I’m a little sad to hear that that’s not, people aren’t asking you more, but ⁓ maybe they’ll start to do so.

Miriam:
You know, so another thing that I just like thought of that I think also contributes to Elementor’s growth, although again, it’s not like one done type of thing is that ⁓ Elementor was created basically to solve the needs of our founders. Like they were building websites and they’re like, we really, the world really needs this thing. We need, we need this thing. So they always say it’s for web creators by web creators. So just want to mention that as well. With regards to learning from us, so a great platform that I think ⁓ could be leveraged in order for us to share our learnings and experience would theoretically be WordCamps. I mean, what better place to get in front of the WordPress community and say, hey, you know, we have this kind of growth, this is, and here’s, you know, some of our learnings and what’s worked for us and what hasn’t worked for us, right? Obviously not everything the company has done has been a success, but I think WordCamps don’t want those types of ⁓ talks because then it’s maybe seem salesy or it’s too focused on a particular brand. So I think that’s not something that we could do. We have had people say, we would love to hear more about Elementor at WordCamps, not just about our journey, but also, you know, ways to ⁓ leverage the platform and make the most of it, but we just can’t. So, but if people want to discuss it. ⁓

Luke:
There’s nothing wrong with doing a WooCommerce talk. Why not an Elementor talk?

Jonathan:
Yeah, maybe that will change too. I understand what you’re saying. Like I’ve been on organizing teams in the past and there is this like, hey, we really want this to be, it’s easy to make assumptions too. It’s easy to make the assumption that a product would be like more commercial in its talk and where that’s not necessarily the case at all. So, and you have volunteers making decisions and it’s like, cause Elementor has been active and had an active presence in WordCamps for quite some time. So maybe that will change. ⁓

Miriam:
Yeah. Absolutely. Maybe, but I’ll just put it out there that if ⁓ people have ideas of how we can share our knowledge in this area with you, then let us know. That’s part of contributing to the ecosystem. Even before Elementor, I’ve always believed in sharing my experiences, my wins, my losses, anything I’ve learned along the way. I’ve given a few talks about that. So if someone’s interested in the Elementor angle, let us know, I guess.

Jonathan:
But yeah.

Yeah. Well, and I’m curious, Miriam, just on that particular thread, as far as, so Elementor is continuing to do its thing. As far as like what’s happening in WordPress core, how much do you feel like?

the contributors who are active in core other than like obviously Elementor sponsors and that’s awesome they’re bringing that perspective but how much advantage of Elementor’s knowledge and experience do feel like the rest of the active contributors are are taking like or or when you’re if i i can see for instance if you’re trying to make a decision about something in wordpress what better way than to like ask the folks who represent a good third of the wordpress space has that gotten better do feel like in recent years of just

the project kind of thinking about Elementor as a like as a place where it’s like, hey, we should make sure that we’re getting feedback on these things. Okay.

Miriam:
No, but we did have a few instances where there were issues that were brought up that they wanted our input on as a large player in the ecosystem. There was something with the plugins that there was like, if you install, both of remember, it was some kind of dependency. If something happened after you install the plugin and went straight into something else and like a lot of the plugins in the ecosystem were like, no, this like breaks all the flows.

Jonathan:
Good. Like a dependency management or something? Yeah.

Miriam:
It’s a poor user experience. And then we actually were asked for our perspective and I made the case for why it was problematic for us and it was rolled back. ⁓ And we have been able to give some input on some tickets that there was something related to some, something that was conceivably security related, but wasn’t exactly anyways. And, and ⁓ our input was listened to, but ⁓ nobody’s getting our input. I don’t expect them to, you know, I don’t know why they would exactly. If it’s valuable they could, but the project has its direction and its philosophy and you know the way it’s doing things and which is great and I don’t know where like our value would come into play there exactly. Yeah.

Jonathan:
A third of the users.

Miriam:
That’s true. Yeah, okay. Yes, I don’t know what to say about that.

Luke:
So I feel… I have a bit of a behind the scenes perspective on Elementor’s, ⁓ how can I say it, their interaction, their engagement with the plugin team. And I would say that far and above, in fact, beyond any other plugin in the repo, Elementor are very proactive when it comes to making sure that they follow all of the rules, right? They follow all the plugin guidelines, even though a lot of other plugins at their size would tend to ask for forgiveness, not permission. They’re very proactive.

We get a lot of, ⁓ emails, not a lot, but like from time to time, we’ll get an email saying, Hey, we’ve, we’re interested in doing this particular thing and implementing it in this particular way. Would that be okay? And the answer is not always yes either. ⁓ and so Elementor do a really good job of, of working around those. And to me, one of my sort of visions for 2026 with the plugin team is I would love to see us addressing some of the dark patterns that you can see in the plugin directory sometimes. And I think of Elementor as a real exemplar when it comes to not doing those sort of gross marketing practices. They’re great at marketing, but still they don’t push things on their users in a sort of dark patternsy way, which I appreciate.

Miriam:
Thank you for saying that. We are very cautious about what we do with our plugins to make sure that they align with the guidelines. ⁓ We respect the guidelines and we also really want our plugins to be available. So we don’t want to make any wrong move that would change that. ⁓ And with regards to like dark patterns, so we don’t do that, and when, if we are promoting, so sometimes in the free version we will promote other products. iI our users complain, because if we’ve overdone it, then we undo it.

Actually a really good example just happened. So we launched a product or subscription that we’re calling Elementor One. Elementor One is ⁓ all of our products together working more seamlessly and one subscription so that you don’t have to have like five different subscriptions. And the users on Elementor One, as we release more products, they’ll get them. So we launched it and then part of the UI changes in the admin around the Elementor stuff was this very big pinkish upgrade button that appeared in the sidebar. my goodness, that was not loved.

There was like a lot, a lot, a lot of, ⁓ I would even say hate towards that. And people were nice actually about their, their feedback, which is one of the good things about the Elementor community. Like there’s some ranters, but even when people rant, they’ll be like, I’m just, I know you’re listening. So this is literally what people say. I know you’re listening. So I want you to hear this because I want to continue using your product. So people were like, this is not okay, and we were like, okay. And immediately it was removed in the next version of Elementor 1. So we will try to ⁓ upsell, but in a reasonable way. And if we get pushed back or we’ve crossed the line, we undo it. Again, that comes back to listening to our users.

Jonathan:
Yeah, and that’s a strength that you can build on that I think is, I mean, especially at your scale though, Miriam, like how do you do that without going insane? Like how do you manage the volume of what you guys get?

Miriam:
It’s not easy. There’s a lot of places that a lot of discussions are happening, right? ⁓ There’s Facebook, there’s Twitter, there’s Reddit. There’s a very active ⁓ and colorful Reddit community for Elementor. ⁓ And then, of course, there’s the private messages that we get and there’s our GitHub. So we monitor all of that. In particular, we have one person on our team, Nicholas Zein. That guy is on the ball, and responding to, YouTube comments also, by the way, because people create YouTube videos reviewing our stuff, which is great. We appreciate every YouTube creator, including those who create stuff that criticizes us. It’s good feedback and it’s fine. And we’re happy people care enough to talk about us. Anyways, Nicholas is out there and responding to everything and he’s a great communicator. He’s also very technically savvy. So he not only explains what we’re like, what we’re doing or why we’re doing it, but if he can help people really troubleshoot things. So, I mean, it’s a bunch of us who are on this, but he holds a lot of it on him and he does an amazing job.

Jonathan:
One of things I’m hearing in that is the risk of so, which is awesome when you have a person that does that, but it’s like what happens if someone retires or they get to move into something else and I can see how, yeah, like it’s gonna be really important for companies to like, this is important regardless of who does this, let’s get someone in this place to do this work, but if we need them to do something else, like having that feedback loop is is really important to have just as a part of the company culture and to keep it up because to me you guys exemplify that you’ve taken that seriously from the beginning and you continue to get the benefit of that today. ⁓

Miriam:
Yeah, for sure. I mean, it’s a function and it’s a practice that is important to the company from before Nicholas and will continue. Hopefully he’ll be with us for a long time because he’s really great. But that’s always the risk, by the way. So back to community, how do you engage with community? You have to do it as a person, right? You can’t do it as a faceless company. And so that means that companies who have strong community activity have a person or people that the community starts to feel connected to and engages with and associates strongly with the company. And people are people, you know? So you always, on the one hand, I think having strong personalities ⁓ who represent the company is a huge advantage because it makes the company more human, more personable, more approachable and accessible. On the other hand, when you’re dependent on people, it’s a risk. But I think it’s a risk companies need to take.

Luke:
Yeah, actually Yoast comes to mind as a plugin that had a real face. I mean, both, both Yoast and Marieke being the face of that company, also, ⁓ does it feel like they’re quite so present, ⁓ representing Yoast SEO anymore? So feels almost, yes, exactly. Yeah. But that, that’s right. But they weren’t replaced.

Miriam:
Well, that’s because they sold the company. They’re not there.

Jonathan:
Yeah, they’re not involved.

Luke:
And you can feel that somehow.

Jonathan:
Yeah, it doesn’t have that same presence. I agree entirely. There is like who are we supposed to think of when it’s Yoast and maybe there is someone doing great work, but they’re they’re certainly not top of mind in comparison.

Luke:
Yeah, and part of that is contributions. Let me ask a little stickier question, Miriam.

Elementor offers a whole page building experience. It’s got its own hosting and it’s got a lot of market share within the WordPress community. From a business perspective, it would be understandable to, especially given some of the changes that have happened in the WordPress community over the last couple of years, to start to see the WordPress project itself as a risk, almost a liability to the business because, and I mean, I have to imagine the question was asked at some point, if WordPress tanks, what does that mean for us? What does that mean for Elementor? And so I’m wondering like, how does Elementor approach that difficult relationship, that dependency?

The dependency relationship with WordPress. Has there ever been any thought or movement towards a standalone version of Elementor that doesn’t have any WordPress attached?

Miriam:
So you know, like, basically, as soon as I joined Elementor and I started to represent it in some way, people started asking me that question. And that’s three and a half years ago, or three years ago, let’s say. People were already like, why are you sticking around WordPress? Why don’t you guys just like break off and go do your own thing? Why do need it? Why are you part of it?

And I understand that there’s been, you know, things have developed in certain direction. And I also think in this world of, ⁓ vibe coding and AI tools where people can, you know, spin up a website in five minutes, ⁓ and launch it. We’re going to see probably a lot of the beginners moving towards that for their websites..

Luke:
..a lot of slop.

Miriam:
⁓ a lot of slop.. that’s going to work for short-term small types of website projects. But I don’t know if you saw Google released a study of performance across the web and basically react based anything just like have terrible results. I don’t think people realize that they’re building websites and that are working against them.

And maybe the vibe coding tools will find ways around it. Who knows, you know, with AI things change every second. So we don’t know. But in any case, what’s going to happen is the pie of the internet. This is my theory, the pie of the internet and the number of websites is going to grow like crazy because every five minutes, don’t know, a hundred thousand people are creating a new website and launching it and potentially connecting a domain name. And it looks like a website.

So the pie is bigger. then WordPress is market share of that pie is just by its nature. Even if WordPress, let’s say has some growth to it, it’s just going to become a smaller part of this ginormous pie of AI flop. Let’s call it. ⁓ And I think in this, in this AI world with the right tools, which hopefully they’ll see, and by the way, Elementor is working intensely on AI tooling for WordPress. And we’re going to be launching properly, Angie very soon. Angie is already in the repo for free to use, but the team has been making amazing progress on it doing amazing things. The combination of bringing AI capabilities to WordPress ⁓ will give WordPress an advantage in this world when people start to come around being like, this is like actually AI slop and actually I want to build a website that grows with me. It’s not just a once off. I want it to have ⁓ SEO capabilities. want it be accessible. I want it to be crawlable. You know, I want all that kind of stuff. ⁓ so that’s WordPress in the AI world.

And then with regards to our dependency on WordPress, Elementor continues to believe very strongly in WordPress in our company ⁓ mission for 2025 and 2026. ⁓ You know, WordPress is like growing in WordPress is one of our goals. ⁓ So, so we’re still, we’re here and we one of the motivations for us creating Angie at our site planner, if people have seen it, that’s like a chat based prompt your way to like a website tool, ⁓ is that we want WordPress to not only survive but thrive. To do that, in our opinion, it needs strong AI tooling. We can’t wait for that to happen. so, we are getting our stuff out there. We have a lot of appreciation for what the WordPress Core AI team is doing. It’s amazing. They’ve done important things in a very short amount of time. What I think people need is to be able to see what AI in WordPress is because the nuts and bolts are there, but like nobody’s releasing anything that actually shows you the power of it. So anyways, we’re still here to say we are.

We have launched a few products that aren’t specifically for WordPress. So we have a new product. We have like a, like a lab division now, a product targeting agencies. They don’t have to be WordPress agencies. They can be in anything agency. It’s to help them grow their businesses. You can check it out. I think it’s sweet. And you’re going to see some more tools like that come out of Elementor, but the lions share and the main by far focus of the company is going to continue to be WordPress for the foreseeable future.

Jonathan:
Well, it’s been awesome watching Elementor grow over the years. And to me, ⁓ you in particular coming on board and being able to be that community face has been it. What I’m hearing you say to that adds up is like it’s a continuation of some strategic choices that Elementor made from the beginning to value user feedback. It became just a logical like, OK, we need that. We’re going to put effort into this. We’re going to put energy into this. Miriam comes into the picture and you get to be, and obviously there’s more than just you that’s interfaces with the community. It’s a team effort. But when I think about Elementor, it’s been a lot of fun to watch the growth. It’s gonna be interesting over the next couple of years, because when I look at this from just an ecosystem lens, Elementor is also contributing to WordPress’s growth. There are people who are coming into WordPress through Elementor, and they’re coming, from my point of view, they’re great.

There’s the product experience and all that, but there’s also this whole ecosystem and community around Elementor and then that even broader around WordPress. And I think it’s for folks who are not directly in the Elementor ecosystem, there’s a lot to be learned from what Elementor has done well. And I think a lot of opportunity to also recognize that as you called out earlier, Miriam, like if you’re in WordPress and doing anything serious, Elementor is part of your own customer base, right? Like folks are going to be using your product in WordPress, like on Elementor. So it’s going be interesting to see what you guys do. And what I love about what you just called out too, is that when it comes to AI, I got to see a little bit of Angie at WordCamp US. You guys were, you had the booth there and you were showing folks and, and, um, you are in a great position to make some of these technologies practical. And if you do something, you have that, that, uh, constraint of what’s sort of best for your users.

My last question for you, Miriam. For folks who are listening who maybe don’t know much about the Elementor ecosystem ⁓ and they want to learn more, any high-level guidance that you’d offer, obviously I would suggest that they play with it themselves if they haven’t actually experienced that they should go in and do that, but anything that you would add for folks who are interested in Elementor.

Miriam:
Like you said, I’ll start with that. We have what we call Elementor Core, which is the free version that’s freely available in the repo and anyone can test it out. So I highly recommend downloading it and just playing around with it. There can be a learning curve to start. So if you search for how to build a website with Elementor in general, but also on YouTube, you’ll find really, really great tutorials. People create really great content about how to use Elementor. And I think it’s also one of the, the contributor star growth that people that are serious professionals, by the way, I mentioned, I said something in the beginning about how Elementor is perceived as not professional, but very large websites in the world are running with Elementor, which is crazy. And there are highly professional teams that prefer it because it gives them velocity. It reduces friction and the less than just get stuff out there that they want to get out there, ⁓ in a polished way. so, but also there’s professionals who create a lot of content around it. So you can find a lot.

And I would just, you know, do that and maybe join our communities. We have a pretty active one on Facebook. The Reddit community is very helpful and you can just, you know, ask your questions, get guidance. And ⁓ if you, if you post on our, on the Facebook community, for example, our team is hovering there watching and is happy to help. So yeah, so there’s a lot of resources out there just again because of the scope of the ecosystem.

Jonathan:
Cool. Well, for anyone interested in getting in contact with you personally, what’s the best way to reach out?

Miriam:
You can connect with me on LinkedIn, that’s a good way, and then you can message me. I’m on Twitter as well, Miriam Schwab. ⁓ And you can email me, miriam at Elementor.com, actually. That’s good way to find me as well.

Jonathan:
Awesome. Well, Miriam, thanks so much for sharing this time with us and for the work that you’ve been doing personally. And I really appreciate your perspective and some of the insights that you could share. And looking forward to seeing what else you and Elementor have going on over this next couple of years.

Miriam:
Well, stay tuned, we have a lot coming up. It’s very intense, but it’s also exciting. So yeah, stay tuned.