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For long-form interviews, news, and commentary about the WordPress ecosystem. This is the companion show to The WP Minute, your favorite 5-minutes of WordPress news every week.
Matt Medeiros (00:01)
Miriam Schwab welcome back to the w p minute
Miriam Schwab (00:04)
Thanks, nice to be back.
Matt Medeiros (00:06)
So it's always good to see you. The last time we saw each other in person was at press conf back in April this year. You travel about 3000 times more than I do. Thankfully. I just saw you at the state of the word. How was that? How was the was the vibe there as they say?
Miriam Schwab (00:27)
It was a very nice event. was people who care about WordPress coming out there, getting together to talk about what was and what we look forward to. As usual, the event was set up really nicely. Also, we weren't actually allowed to take photos inside the venue.
Matt Medeiros (00:53)
The Salesforce tower.
Miriam Schwab (00:55)
Yeah, it was in the Salesforce tower. ⁓ So we were on the 58th floor, some really high floor. But the way they set up the space for the event was really actually beautiful. There was these big lettering for Save the Word, and there was this wall of jazz records that you could listen to. And there was this art ⁓ craft thing. You actually could make art there. I did it. I actually have it in my living room.
And it's a shame that we couldn't take photos of that, because I would have loved to have shared what it looked like in there and how they set up. There were mugs, state of the word branding. was a very beautiful event. And I came out of it feeling inspired, which I think we always need a little shot of inspiration to keep going and doing what we're especially around AI. So AI is on the one hand a huge opportunity, but also potentially a threat.
for a space like ours, where we've been around for over 20 years. We're kind of legacy in some ways, doing things what's considered the old school way. So what does AI mean for us? But what's impressive is that the AI team was set up six months ago, had a few clear objectives, and they achieved all of them by the end of the year for rolling out in 6.9. Super impressive speed and focus. And that is also inspiring to know.
that the project leadership and those leading the way for how we implement AI are very focused and ⁓ dedicated to making WordPress not only have parity with the world of AI, but potentially leading the world of AI. So yeah, so I away feeling good and it was a really nice event and it was great to catch up with people and yeah, I'm glad I went.
Matt Medeiros (02:51)
It was unfortunate that you couldn't take those photos because that was actually one of my criticisms of the event was, you know, I did obviously I did not attend, but I would have liked to. just, you know, logistically, it just wasn't going to work out. But one of the things that I noticed is just the way it was shot and presented and the live stream, even though the live stream kept breaking, it really just looked like we're in this room talking to like 12 people, whereas like Tokyo last year was.
on a stage, there was multi-camera angles, and I was like, ⁓ man, we're going into Apple Day with WordPress event like this, and I love that. And I was like, this is great. mean, the temperature in the room was tough back in Tokyo last year, but I was like, ⁓ can't wait to see what's gonna happen this year, and I was like, are we just in a side office somewhere? Like, what's happening?
Miriam Schwab (03:40)
my gosh, I didn't think of it from that perspective. Yes. But that you're right, because the only thing we were allowed to take photos of, and I guess the camera angle was based on that as well, was the view. Right. So that's why on camera you saw like a smattering of us in a room, which by the way, the room went farther back, obviously. And all you could see was whoever was speaking and the window behind them because they weren't allowed to show anything. By the way, I don't know why we weren't allowed to take photos in there.
It was a space like any other space, meaning like it was very nice. I've been in other very nice spaces. By the way, I don't think that this regulation about taking photos was an automatic thing. It was related to the space that we were using. And by the way, just about the live stream. the talks start and you would think that we didn't know that there were issues with live stream, but pretty quickly people started messaging me actually.
to tell me ⁓ the live stream isn't working. So I started messaging people there that I know had something, you know, were connected to the logistics or whatever. Basically, Salesforce's infrastructure went down. Something like that, like in the building, like something really crazy and terrible in terms of timing, obviously. And they were like struggling with it to get it back up and running. They even had some kind of redundancy and that also
didn't manage to kick in. Basically, it wasn't that they didn't care and that they didn't know. They did know. And there were a lot of people scrambling around trying to get things up and running. And they just couldn't. And it was because it was related to the venue. So that was so unfortunate also because I don't know if we can have any indication of how many people were interested in trying to view it remotely because they couldn't even get through. And people just gave up eventually because why should they try to watch this thing they can't watch?
Matt Medeiros (05:15)
Yeah.
Miriam Schwab (05:32)
So that was a shame, but it's recorded. At least that worked so people can see it that way. And yeah, I guess it's important to share that we weren't allowed to take photos of the interior. And that's why it looked so bare bones. It wasn't bare bones.
Matt Medeiros (05:48)
It definitely would have changed my criticism. ⁓
Miriam Schwab (05:51)
No,
it's totally genetic criticism. ⁓
Matt Medeiros (05:54)
And you know, I know it can sound like a nitpicky thing, but ⁓ I criticize an event like that. I said this in the podcast because I want automatic to represent us in the best way. if that's like our Apple Day, let's say ⁓ state of the word, ⁓ you know, in TechCrunch and other, you know, bigger media outlets are covering it. I want to see a little bit more so that people are like, are they running out of money?
Miriam Schwab (06:27)
I'll show you what I have. So you're totally right, and I agree with you. want WordPress to lead us in a strong way, and we should look like we're a thriving ecosystem in some ways. This type of event is that. look, the branding was so beautiful. I have this weird blur thing going on. But it says that, anyways, everything was about this kind of record, like a vinyl record design.
the coasters, the mugs, the swag. We got very nice t-shirts and hats. And then also the art. The art was like you picked the vinyl record and then you like painted it and it actually turned out really cool. So it was on the level of Tokyo from that perspective. It was very high quality events. It's just, I guess the only people who could enjoy that were the people that were there.
Matt Medeiros (07:15)
Yeah, well,
it's good to know. mean, I know they did like this marketing montage of Tokyo last year, like leading into work camp, and I couldn't find that video again. I forgot where it was even posted. But maybe they'll do something. You know, maybe there were some videographers there and, know, maybe
Miriam Schwab (07:30)
But again, can they even show anything? Like, what can you show people standing against the windows? That's really
Matt Medeiros (07:33)
Right.
Yeah,
it's great. Yeah. Well, let's let's take it. Let's take it to AI. ⁓ AI is a core part of like, I guess a lot of innovation happening across many companies ⁓ in our sector, you know, this this year and of course, years before that. I know AI ⁓ elementors AI integration for Elementor the site building product.
Miriam Schwab (07:41)
Yeah.
Matt Medeiros (08:01)
When it first came out, there was just a lot of criticism like, my God, like because it was early, like Elementor was ahead of the, you know, AI building space. And it's just like, how do I turn this thing off? But AI has gotten arguably much better and I'm sure the experience has gotten much better. ⁓ Is there a core guiding principle at Elementor on integrating AI and how you approach it in an open way? So it's not just.
We're not just getting AI taxed, guess is my best phrase for it.
Miriam Schwab (08:33)
So from the start, I think it was something like ChatGPT launched and within a very short amount of time, Elementor's product development kind of stopped. Not exactly stopped, but there was like a kind of, on, what does this mean for us? And an AI team was like very quickly set up in Elementor. There was like an understanding that whatever AI means for us and for the industry, we have to be part of it now and we can't wait another second.
So that's why we launched the first approach or version of AI in Elementor slash WordPress, which was kind of straightforward, ⁓ which is like here, create an image, create some HTML, create CSS, write a blog post, whatever, that kind of stuff. There were some interesting pieces of functionality that were part of the AI then, which was like this, ⁓ if you were like,
building a page, then it would suggest to you the next section of the page and then like kind of lay it out for you. It didn't do a great job of that, but it was like, the thinking behind that was, okay, let's also be proactive for our users and try to like hold their hand while they're building. And because it's also new, our team and all of us were just like trying to figure it out as we go along and try to find the best and most valuable application. So we started with that.
And basically, because we started early, even if the first application wasn't amazing and people were like, turn it off. A lot of people want to turn it off because of that suggestion thing, because they're like, stop it. Why are you building this next section of my page? But since then, we've been learning a ton. we have a lot of data around the usage, so we can then improve the application.
Since then, we've launched a few more AI products. We have this one called Site Planner, which is an external tool, which is free to use, planner.elementor.com. And people can go and chat their way to a website brief, site map, and what we call the wireframe of a site. But the wireframe is like, the way I see it, it's like 80 % of the way there to a website. And then the professionals can come in and tweak it and polish it and wrap it up in.
and bring their vision to the final leg of the project. So there's that. And then you can launch directly into hosting or download or zip or whatever. And then we also launched a product which is still in beta, which is called Angie, which is an agentic AI assistant for WordPress. So it sits there next to you in the dashboard, and it can do all sorts of things. In many ways, with that, the sky's the limit. But also because the sky's the limit, it can
still do weird things. And so that's why it's still in beta. So on the one hand, you can do things with it you're like, my gosh, that's amazing. And then on the other hand, you'll try to do things with it and still like a bit wonky. But we hope to like fine tune that pretty soon and bring it out of beta. But people can test it. It's in the WordPress repo and it's free to use. There's no limitations. Because AI costs, right?
not because of us, but because AI just costs. So at some point, there's credits involved in this stuff. But at the moment, like Angie and Site Planner, although there's obviously cost to us for use, we are not charging anyone. So feel free to test it out.
Matt Medeiros (11:56)
curious, like from what you can reveal, and I'm not asking you to reveal anything secret, but one of the other criticisms I have of the AI initiatives at Automatic and of course through WordPress.org and such, like James Team and whatnot is I'm not hearing a lot about open source models. I'm hearing a lot about like, ⁓ grab a token from ChachiBT, grab a token or open AI, grab a token from Anthropic for Claude. And like you said, these all
I mean there will be a cost for open source models anyway because you have to run it somewhere But I'm just curious like is there an initiative to use any of the open source models that aren't tied to you know these companies raising trillions of dollars and Only are you we're gonna raise the price like all streaming services due to us ⁓ You know throughout the year ⁓ Is there any thought process on like which models to select? Can you talk about which models you select and is open source any part of that discussion internally at Elementor?
Miriam Schwab (12:55)
So I think everyone aspires to using open source LLMs, but here's what I understand. And I also see from the experience with our own team, even with the paid models, the more advanced models bring way better results, like significantly better results than the lower models. And so with open source LLMs, the results that they bring just aren't the quality that we would want.
for a valuable experience in using AI as part of your web building, web management experience. It's just not there. So theoretically, you could hook into them. ⁓ A lot of AI tools, and ours, I think, will have that option as well. You can hook into different LLMs of your choice. Other tools, and actually, think this is how we're going to do it, will use a particular LLM depending on what it is that you're trying to do.
Claude might be better for one thing and Gemini might be better for another thing and it will make that decision for you. ⁓ So we're in this world where even like very high level LLMs can be trickier to use than others and really the results can vary wildly almost in terms of the quality. I think even though being part of an open source world and or leading the open source world even with WordPress,
⁓ and Elementor being a significant player in that world and us all generally aspiring to open source. Currently, it's not realistic in order to make AI useful, unfortunately. But it's possible that it will get there. Things move so fast that ⁓ in six months time, a year, the open source elements might be good enough for people to suffice. But at the moment, it's just not there.
Matt Medeiros (14:49)
When you stepped away from the ⁓ state of the word, feeling inspired about the AI stuff, if you take your Elementor hat off for a moment, what was the most aspiring part of that AI discussion for you? Like what gives you renewed energy for WordPress because of AI?
Miriam Schwab (15:09)
So first of all, the speed definitely plays a role. Meaning just the fact that they said they were going to do something and they did it, it's very ⁓ reassuring and inspiring. Also, the thinking behind it, I think, is really great. The team that's leading AI, James, Felix, Jason, Jeff, I think that's who's on the team, and some others. Sorry if I'm forgetting people. They're all bringing really ⁓ valuable perspectives to it. ⁓
I think they're making really good decisions and ⁓ taking things in a really good direction. In particular, the Abilities API. ⁓ So on the one hand, the work that they've done on AI is very infrastructure level. You can't see it. ⁓ It's almost like another world of WordPress, meaning WordPress itself on its own and core is essentially an infrastructure for extensibility. And that's where a lot of the value comes into play.
That's what they're doing with AI. It's creating infrastructure for extensibility so that ⁓ all AI tools of any kind can eventually hook into WordPress and get it to do stuff, which is amazing. ⁓ The Abilities API also is great in general for ⁓ reducing conflict issues between products and plugins in WordPress. It's actually got this additional benefit, not just for AI.
That's a really smart perspective. It pulls WordPress forward, not just for AI, but also as a platform. On the flip side, the challenge with what they've been doing until now is that it's invisible, meaning everyone who downloaded 6.9 doesn't see the AI implementation. It's just under the hood. So I'm hoping that we'll start to see more developers, product creators. By the way, you don't even have to be a developer anymore. Vibe coders creating like
you know, experiments, POCs, like tooling that utilizes the abilities API so that people can start to see the power of it. ⁓ So yeah, so yeah, so that's what I'm inspired about the fact they did it so fast. They did what they set out to do. It's a very smart approach in my opinion. They're very passionate and energized about it too, which gives, which energizes others. It's, they're a good team.
Matt Medeiros (17:29)
Yeah, yeah, and I fully agree with that. was, you know, one of the criticisms. mean, look, this one of the criticisms I wrote about and I didn't mean to turn I don't mean to turn this into like a review of state of the word, but you were boots on the ground and we can't hear. ⁓ Was was just that like this year was ⁓ in a sports term like it's a rebuilding year, right? Like we.
We're getting these features that are just setting the groundwork for you know version 7 and beyond in 2026 You know in future stuff there wasn't anything tactile that people could touch except for like a cool notes feature Which no hey, I appreciate but it's not like we're not earth-shattering anything with that stuff but in the same sense and what I wrote in the piece was To give us so give WordPress some grace because how 2025 started
Compared to where we've ended was a lot different because 2025 started with like what is even happening to WordPress anymore? And now we're like, okay, we've got some direction and people are inspired by it. So That is a good thing, know in my opinion I was talking to Brian courts because I started just like you said not a developer and Cloud code is so darn powerful. It's doing some stuff. That is just I mean
it's getting it right and it's doing it right and I'm testing things against the plugin checker and I'm talking to other WordPress developers like no, this thing that what you've built is working and so two things. ⁓ I'm actually a little worried about the abilities API as exciting as it is. It almost sounds like we're opening the door like the support doors for people to be like I connected my you know MCP up to my WordPress site in elementary. You're not building the pages the way I'm telling AI and you say, whoa, whoa, whoa. Like I know I can't support.
you through your MCP and whatever AI tool you're using. you know, no real question here, but I just wonder if you have any thoughts of like what the world looks like for supporting WordPress when because I see the future that you see like I can just chat with my chat bot and say build me these 20 pages, insert this content, put these images on these product pages here, hit enter and let it go. And then if it doesn't work, somebody submits a ticket to Elementor and says hey.
This isn't working. Any thoughts on what that vibe code world looks like for those of us who support customers with WordPress?
Miriam Schwab (19:53)
So when people are creating their MCPs for their own products, they need to put guardrails in place. That's a really important part of AI in general. Just even for the LLMs, you know, they're constantly talking about how they can keep us secure without exposing, you know, dangerous information or getting access to private information, right? There's like a constant struggle between being a very open form of communication, essentially, access to a lot of information while keeping guardrails in place to
keep us all safe and secure. So it's the same with your own product. For example, Elementor's Angie plugin solution allows you to do all sorts of stuff with Elementor, but the team has put guardrails in place to make sure that you don't delete all your site. I at one point found something that led to a guardrail, for example, in the early days of Angie. I managed to lead the AI to delete the admin level user of my own site.
which is obviously something we don't want to happen. So if we want people to be able to create MCPs for WordPress or for our own products, we need to have guardrails in place that don't allow them to push the product past a point of disaster. ⁓ And so with regards to support, that's going to be a big part of it. And we'll keep learning and tweaking as we go along. Because like I said, the sky's the limit in a way. we don't, because there's infinite like things that people can ask AI to do, we can't take them all into account. And then
While we try to take as much as possible into account, we only often learn things like when I manage to do that to my own site. ⁓ But there's another interesting angle of support which came up with Angie because Angie allows other products to integrate, ⁓ creating the SEPs and integrate with Angie. we have integrations from CruckleBlock, from WSForm, and the Events Calendar, and some other ⁓ stellar WP plugins that can be managed through the Angie interface.
But this question came up, what if there's an issue? Who is responsible for the support there? And how can we identify where the issue is coming from? So that's another learning for our team. Our team put in place a UI, which tells the user, OK, right now you're actually interacting with the events calendar or with a CrocoBlox product or whatever. And it indicates whether that will help reduce ⁓ support issues and streamline things. Who knows? ⁓
But it's like learning and trying to constantly improve and create greater clarity and transparency, guardrails, all of that is something that product developers just need to take into consideration.
Matt Medeiros (22:32)
Yeah, because I think it's going to be in it. And again, this is just healthy criticism. I think what we're talking about right now is an end user who goes and does something and like they're more tech savvy right now because AI is still, you know, from the general population, it's cutting edge. Not a lot of people are still using it. But I think what automatic and WordPress is going to strive for is ⁓ like openness everywhere. And we're not going to have a say of
I mean, we're going to have a say in terms of like open source. The point I'm getting at is I think what WordPress is going to strive for is say, hey, any chat system talk to WordPress, which means they're going to let everybody in through the doors. And then we as product people are going to have to be like, OK, hold on, everybody. Before you come down this aisle, I need you to understand that you can't do this, that and the other thing if you come down this aisle. And that's going to be kind of interesting. I think while WordPress pushes us
to that openness for the web, we're gonna have to be the ones, like you said, to get those guardrails correct. ⁓ Yeah. Experience.
Miriam Schwab (23:39)
There will be guardrails.
It's definitely an experience. There will be guardrails that are to protect users and their websites. But there will also just be functionality that at certain points along the way won't be manageable by AI. You have to create the tools. They're called tools for your product that makes them accessible to AI. And if you haven't exposed all the functionality of your product and all the tools, then some things just won't be doable. ⁓
Like in Angie, for example, ⁓ our team recently implemented functionality where Angie will tell you if it can't do something rather than pretend or lead you on. It will just be like, that's something I can't do. And it's, a matter of greater transparency and clarity, but also realizing that while AI seems infinite and can be all and do all, there are going to be limits. AI moves so fast that whatever is limited to eight
might not be in limit in a month. But that's just how it's going to be. Because also, especially if you take plugins into consideration that are like almost platforms in and of themselves, like Elementor. I mean, the capabilities behind the scenes in the Elementor page builder is just enormous. it's a whole world. ⁓
Matt Medeiros (25:01)
There's another thing I'd to get your thoughts on. Again, no direct question, but when I was talking to Brian, and I'll try to link up that live stream in the show notes here, we were talking about how I use Cloud Code and how I talk to it. Again, I'm not a developer, but I know what needs to be done from a product perspective. mean, 90 % knows what needs to be done from a product perspective, from a sustainable perspective.
And I talk to it like I'm helping it learn and understand this thing that I'm building, right? And we were chatting and it dawned on us like it's not that much different than if we hired, you know, some freelancer and we're like, hey, we got a task for you, go and build it. And even sometimes the human doesn't get that right. And and there are people out there criticizing folks for using AI to build simple pieces of software. And it's like, well, you know,
Even if I gave this to a human, bet I'd be going back and forth with them and they'd be getting it wrong or trying to cut corners. Should we be upset at the folks? I guess here's the question where I want your remark is, should we be upset at the folks who are adopting this to build stuff with? I remember, and you remember 15, 20 years ago when page builders first came out, people were like, God, you're using a page builder. You're doing it wrong.
Here we are in 2025 where it's like, if you're not using a page builder, you're doing it wrong. And like the whole script was flipped. like, I don't know if you have any thoughts on like the vibe coding thing right now. Is it bad? Like how do you perceive it? Especially at Elementor where there's like now you're responsible for that freelancer or agencies, everything, the site, the accessibility, the AI, the email sending, like there's so much that Elementor does now.
thoughts on people leveraging AI?
Miriam Schwab (26:59)
So by the way, that ⁓ conflict of how can you do it this newfangled way even goes back to the early days of CMSs. We were just talking at Elementor, so one of our ⁓ veteran WordPress developers, he's been working with WordPress for very long time. ⁓ They were joking that when they said we should start building with WordPress ⁓ pre-Elementor, he was like, no, I'm gonna hand code it myself.
Right? Like what? I'm not going to use this thing. I'm going to do it from scratch. And then people are like, of course you need the CMS. And then page builds came along. They're like, ⁓ what is this? How can you do that? It's so unprofessional. We need to hand code it ourselves, but in a different way. And then they became comfortable with page builders more or less. And now we have vibe coding. And I think vibe coding is amazing. Like in the end, what is a developer writing? A language. But it's like ⁓ French.
Well, to me, or I don't know, you know, a foreign language where if I was told to do all my stuff in French, I would be breaking my teeth and it be hard on my brain because I don't know the language. So people who don't know how to develop and I'm not like it's it's obviously more there's more deficit than what I'm saying. But like the difference between a developer and a non developer is that the developer knows the language and the non developer doesn't know the language. So
Just like OpenAI or LLMs now kind of ⁓ make all languages accessible. Like I was watching someone at work, like a few months ago, I don't know, it had never dawned on me, vibe coding a little app in ChachiPT in Hebrew. I was like, you do that in Hebrew? And then obviously OpenAI doesn't care what language you're speaking in or writing in because to them, to it, all languages are whatever. It's just flat.
So the same with vibe coding. Like, why should only someone who's managed to learn the language be able to create something? Why, if I have a vision in my head and I can say it in natural language, why shouldn't that also lead to an end result? ⁓ I think it creates great opportunities for everyone. just like, by the way, it's just like WordPress, right? With WordPress, you have people who build terrible sites and then people who build super polished, super performance, super secure sites.
And that's all fine because it's the web and the web is a crazy thing. And you can do things however you want. And you have the right to publish your terrible site and you have the right to publish your amazing site. So same here. People are going to create vibe-coded apps or whatever. And some of them are going to be bad. And some of them are going to be great. And that's going to be the same story. It's like, can you communicate your vision? Do you understand product and user experience enough to create amazing things with it? Or are you just like an amateur who's doing your own thing, which is also
fine and great and legitimate and you do you and it's all good. The one thing that mostly concerns me about all of this is security. I don't know if you saw this major react vulnerability that happened last week. So, you know, that's a major vulnerability that's out of that was out of the hands of pretty much everyone. like, who knows what's being put out there with that's connected to private sensitive information. Like that's something that is going to need serious attention. But other than that, build your crappy app, build your great thing.
Matt Medeiros (30:24)
I'm putting that on a t-shirt build your crappy app and I'm to go to all the AI conferences with it. Build your crappy app. No, mean, yeah, it's it is ⁓ I've been swinging back and forth on, you know, the adoption of AI. Of course, when it first came out, I was like, God, no, I don't think this is going to be it.
Miriam Schwab (30:25)
Go for it, you know?
Matt Medeiros (30:53)
And then I started using it and I was like, OK, this is starting to go pretty well. And then like halfway through that, I was like, this is not it again. But now with Claude four or five Opus, I'm like, man, this this is doing some really killer stuff with with at least WordPress plugin development. And, you know, I think it's going to get better. I think the cost is going to rise substantially that we haven't realized yet for like the real good stuff.
⁓ in the future, but yeah, like I think that that lower end is gonna get dried up and and I think we'll all benefit from it at the end of the day at least on the coding and development side. ⁓
Miriam Schwab (31:35)
And
also, by the way, with regards to cost, we've been doing WordPress meetups at our office. So like we just started in 2025. And at the last one, we talked about vibe coding. And one guy talked about this very comprehensive app that he vibe coded and how it cost him $800. And we were like, oh my gosh, $800. But then if you think about it, if he had hired a team, it would have cost way more than $800. I think we're going to have a long period of time where even with the higher cost,
It's still going to allow us to do incredible things that in the past would have cost us multiples more.
Matt Medeiros (32:08)
Yeah, I
think the next shoe to drop this again is my crazy. You can't leave one of my episodes without getting a crazy tin foil hat prediction is the next price jump will be just another zero on the end of of these LLMs like Claude code. So like Claude code it. think when everything was like 20 bucks or $20. OK, all right. Like where do we spend this money? And then once.
people started using it and they came out with the hundred and two hundred dollar model. You're like, OK, like I see where this is going. But now, if if if it because basically what you're doing this little bit of a side tangent is you're trying to get this thing to work. And the caveat is it's never getting it right 100 percent of the time. It's never giving you the best way to do it unless you keep iterating and spending more tokens. And I think what they're going to say is once these things get even better, they're going to say, OK, it's two thousand dollars a month.
But guess what your best engineer cost you? 10 times that so you know why not spend the $2,000 a month to get this thing and that's when we're gonna start to see that separation of bigger people with more money being able to deploy a lot faster and even if that faster is Literally only 30 days they'll get to market 30 days faster than the competition because they're able to spend
So anyway, that's what I think. Elementor.com. Lots of stuff now, we'll wrap it up here, but one last question. Go to Elementor.com and you go into the product section. There's a nice new drop down with all the stuff that Elementor does, website building, Angie, site planner. I did a video on site planner, it is really awesome. Of course, the hello theme. There's a hosting column, hosting for WordPress, hosting for WooCommerce, and now a new domains. yes, that's very new. On the run and grow.
column, have image optimizer, site mailer, ally web accessibility, and send. Going into 2026, your final question is, which of those many products are you excited for when we roll into 2026 a few short weeks away?
Miriam Schwab (34:26)
So that's a lot of products, as you know, because you just read them all out. And the thinking behind them is that the web creator's journey doesn't just start and end with actually building a website. First of all, they want to build the website in high quality way. So implementing accessibility at that stage, making sure sites are as accessible as possible is important. Optimizing for performance is important. But then once the site launches, that's not the end. That's just the beginning. So how can you maintain that site in
like an ideal way and what tools can help you log away. So that's the thing behind those products. Personally, and they're all great, but I'm just going to say which personally I'm most excited about. So I'm really excited about our AI products. ⁓ I think when we get them to where we want them to be, because let's say Angie's still in beta, ⁓ they'll be game changers for our industry. And I'm excited about that also.
for WordPress. All the tools that are being built in WordPress for AI are important. Elementor powers 30 % of WordPress sites. So the faster we can get our kind of market share to an AI place, I think it's better for everyone in the industry. ⁓ And hopefully we'll keep WordPress strong and going forward for the future. The other tool that I really love of ours is Ally. Ally.
does something really great with accessibility. And this is how put it. It makes accessibility accessible, which is ironic. But if you use it, you get very clear, understandable ⁓ description of issues and how to fix them. Also AI-powered, many of those issues. So that instead of just getting a laundry list of these things are all bad, good luck to you, you can go through them, which is often the situation. ⁓
So you can go through them and fix, fix, fix, fix, and really bring your site to a much more accessible place. We're not saying it's 100 % accessible. I don't know if that's even a thing. But it will definitely take your site forward in a way and make it ⁓ more accessible to an audience that might currently be having trouble ⁓ accessing your site. So I think Ally is really great. the team is releasing new updates pretty regularly. And they're really cool.
So I'm excited about that one.
Matt Medeiros (36:49)
Awesome stuff. Miriam Schwab from Elementor. Thanks for hanging out today.
Miriam Schwab (36:53)
Thanks for having me.