Perspectives With Miriam Schwab  🔗 **Source:** [Perspectives With Miriam Schwab](https://share.snipd.com/episode/4c12c58e-a10c-4e34-8e05-3d285911efa7) ## Highlights - **How Elementor Built A Massive Ecosystem** - Elementor became one of the largest WordPress ecosystems by design, shipping hooks and filters to enable third-party add-ons early on. - That priming plus timing, strong marketing, and a user-feedback loop created ~30% WordPress adoption and ~1,000 third-party add-ons. Transcript: Miriam Schwab So Elementor is quite large. It has a large scale. The last numbers that I checked, we're something like 30.8% of WordPress sites right now and 13.1% of all websites. So the scale is... Jonathan 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 are Elementor in the title. Miriam Schwab That's crazy. That's a lot. We definitely have, I mean, a number that I heard in terms of the number of add-ons specifically for Elementor is 1,000. I'm not exactly sure where that number comes from, but just that number that's like products that are specifically oriented to Elementor users, it boggles the mind. Jonathan I think I've reviewed more than that. Miriam Schwab You're probably like, oh, Elementor again? Yeah. But by the way, another plugin that has a large ecosystem is WooCommerce. Of course. WooCommerce also has a lot of extensions, add-ons that were 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 and 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. Luke 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 also like 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 veins, something I haven't paid as much attention to. I'm curious if there's any insight that you can share. ([Time 0:16:14](https://share.snipd.com/snip/2aaa3003-b5d0-40f5-aa7d-9765c77566c6)) - **How Elementor Built A Massive Ecosystem** - Elementor became one of the largest WordPress ecosystems by design, shipping hooks and filters to enable third-party add-ons early on. - That priming plus timing, strong marketing, and a user-feedback loop created ~30% WordPress adoption and ~1,000 third-party add-ons. Transcript: Miriam Schwab So Elementor is quite large. It has a large scale. The last numbers that I checked, we're something like 30.8% of WordPress sites right now and 13.1% of all websites. So the scale is... Jonathan 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 are Elementor in the title. Miriam Schwab That's crazy. That's a lot. We definitely have, I mean, a number that I heard in terms of the number of add-ons specifically for Elementor is 1,000. I'm not exactly sure where that number comes from, but just that number that's like products that are specifically oriented to Elementor users, it boggles the mind. Jonathan I think I've reviewed more than that. Miriam Schwab You're probably like, oh, Elementor again? Yeah. But by the way, another plugin that has a large ecosystem is WooCommerce. Of course. WooCommerce also has a lot of extensions, add-ons that were 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 and 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. Luke 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 also like 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 veins, something I haven't paid as much attention to. I'm curious if there's any insight that you can share. ([Time 0:16:14](https://share.snipd.com/snip/aa400582-57b1-4755-b064-d768a8f71118)) - **Make User Feedback Central To Growth** - Listen and respond to users aggressively; take complaints seriously but measure them against broader adoption metrics. - Use in-person channels (WordCamps, booths) to hear quiet positive signals that don't surface online. Transcript: Miriam Schwab Quite unique. 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. It wasn't for you. I also thought it wasn't going to be for me. I was like, yeah, is a it's a different world right but um i found my place there and it worked out but i totally get you um 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 the company's growth even from three and a half years ago when i joined every year it's just i mean, the numbers. 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 it was, and it stayed there. So the growth has been just crazy. 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. ([Time 0:19:57](https://share.snipd.com/snip/b1cda778-eaaf-4f7c-8fd3-6b5f2c3fe7e2)) - **Engage Competitors To Improve Shared User Experience** - Public community engagement matters because many ecosystem partners both dislike and depend on you. - You don't need universal approval; instead build working relationships so shared users get a consistent experience. Transcript: Miriam Schwab That is a very good question. For Elementor specifically, it matters that the company has a face that people can, 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, 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. ([Time 0:22:54](https://share.snipd.com/snip/5a31b84a-2bf1-4d19-a612-661cae5408a7)) - **Roll Out Big Rewrites In Parallel To Preserve Sites** - To evolve without breaking millions of sites, Elementor is rolling out version 4 incrementally, running v3 and v4 components in parallel. - This parallel approach preserves backward compatibility while introducing atomic, CSS-class-based architecture. Transcript: Miriam Schwab 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. I didn't know that. 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, CSS classes. 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, like 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 v4 you can and trying to make sure that even just our own product is living in harmony so that's the main focus uh for the page builder Right now. ([Time 0:28:21](https://share.snipd.com/snip/4e2e6a8f-3a87-412e-9fee-55aa827bcb51)) - **How A Single UI Change Triggered Quick Rollback** - Elementor launched Elementor One with a prominent upgrade button and immediately received strong user backlash. - The team removed the UI prompt in the next release after listening to community feedback. Transcript: Miriam Schwab So we launched a product or subscription that we're calling Elementor One. Elementor 1 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 1, as we release more products, they'll get them. 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. Oh, 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 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. ([Time 0:42:47](https://share.snipd.com/snip/2ce59a0c-d0ee-471a-8020-f2df5173b1f1)) - **Staff A Dedicated Community Response Function** - Assign people to monitor all community channels; make community engagement a formal company function. - Use technically savvy communicators who can both explain decisions and help troubleshoot issues. Transcript: Miriam Schwab 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 Zane, That guy is on the ball and responding to, oh, 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 doing or why we're doing it, but 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 i one of the things i'm hearing in that is the uh the risk of so which is awesome when you Luke 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 um yeah like it's going to 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 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 Schwab 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. ([Time 0:44:32](https://share.snipd.com/snip/dded88e1-c22b-4ad5-a817-e23edc27dd29)) - **Why Elementor Stays Committed To WordPress** - Elementor views WordPress as a strategic partner, not a liability, and is investing in AI tooling to keep WordPress competitive. - They launch non-WordPress tools too, but the company's main focus remains growing WordPress via products like Angie and site planner. Transcript: Miriam Schwab 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 you 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. A lot of slop. 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, I don't know, 100,000 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. So then WordPress's 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 AI world with the right tools, which hopefully you'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. It's 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, oh, this is like actually AI slop. And oh, 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. I want it to 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. Uh, and we, one of the main, um, 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, um, 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. And 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 what ai and wordpress is because the the that's 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 lab division now, a product called Suite, which is targeting agencies. They don't have to be WordPress agencies. They can be an anything agency. It's to help them grow their businesses. You can check it out. I think it's osuite.ai. And you're going to see some more tools like that come out of Elementor. But the lion's share and the main, by far, focus of the company is going to continue to be WordPress for the foreseeable future. ([Time 0:49:20](https://share.snipd.com/snip/2098df0d-830b-4c27-a8bc-144a3a0560c2)) - **Elementor Pushes AI Tools While Staying Committed to WordPress** - Elementor is building AI tooling (like Angie and a site planner chat tool) to ensure WordPress sites remain high-quality and not just "AI slop." - The company believes strong AI features will help WordPress sites be crawlable, accessible, SEO-ready, and able to grow over time rather than being one-off pages. - Elementor is actively shipping AI work themselves and appreciates WordPress core AI efforts, but says few releases show the real power of AI+WordPress yet. - Beyond core WordPress products, Elementor launched a lab product called Suite (osuite.ai) targeting agencies of any platform to help grow their businesses. - Despite new products, Elementor's primary focus for the foreseeable future remains supporting and growing within the WordPress ecosystem. Transcript: Miriam Schwab 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 what ai and wordpress is because the the that's 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 lab division now, a product called Suite, which is targeting agencies. They don't have to be WordPress agencies. They can be an anything agency. It's to help them grow their businesses. You can check it out. I think it's osuite.ai. And you're going to see some more tools like that come out of Elementor. ([Time 0:53:02](https://share.snipd.com/snip/bcc0e7da-ba19-4565-921d-88f8e83a3a20)) - **Learn Elementor By Doing And Joining Communities** - Try Elementor Core from the plugin repo to learn its workflow and join active communities on Facebook and Reddit for tutorials. - Leverage abundant YouTube tutorials and community help; Elementor team members monitor those groups for support. Transcript: Miriam Schwab Like you said, I'll start with that. We have the Elementor, 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 contributors to our growth that people that are serious professionals. By the way, 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 it lets them just get stuff out there that they want to get out there in A polished way. 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. ([Time 0:56:11](https://share.snipd.com/snip/f0fb826e-bb1d-44b6-a900-657e40d8e757))