Build log · Page Builder Sandwich
Building Page Builder Sandwich: Neil Lock
Builder Neil Lock, Co-founder and developer · United Kingdom
Timestamp · 2 min transmission
How it started
The WordPress page builder Page Builder Sandwich is built by Neil Lock and developed, sold and supported by Zinn Digital® Ltd, his company. Page Builder Sandwich first appeared in 2015, and with version 6 the Zinn Digital® team built it again from the ground up. On his own site, Neil describes his WordPress plugins as built to WordPress.org's standards, translated, and maintained by the team that runs his hosting.
The problem
Most page builders make a page heavy and then keep it locked in. Each page pulls in the builder's full stylesheet and script, and the content sits inside layer after layer of the builder's own markup. And when the builder is switched off, shortcodes are what remains on the page.
What he built
Page Builder Sandwich does the opposite: every page is stored as standard WordPress blocks, so WordPress, the theme and any SEO plugin can read it, and it still shows its content if the plugin is switched off. Each page loads only the styles of the blocks on it, from the site's own uploads folder, and interactive blocks use WordPress's Interactivity API instead of jQuery. Class names are neutral and there are no generator tags or HTML comments, so the builder leaves no signature. For the people building, there is Sandwich Studio, a full-screen editor with a layers panel, undo history and a command palette, a free accessibility checker, and an MCP server with 150 tools so Claude and other AI agents can build pages with the user's own permissions.
The hard parts
A new builder still has to respect old pages: content built with versions 4 and 5 converts to blocks in the background and looks exactly as it did. A test on a clean WordPress site on 1 October 2026 put a number on it: 0.5 kB added, 0 outside requests, and a phone Lighthouse performance score of 100 with or without version 6.28.0. To protect cached pages, scripts and stylesheets now keep one address from release to release, and an update never leaves a cached page pointing at a missing file.
Milestones
A free Lite version (14 January 2016), a redesigned version 3.0 (17 October 2016) and version 4.0 on its first birthday (16 January 2017) were the early steps. Today the free plugin has 44 blocks and 20 website kits, and Pro adds 68 blocks and 8 kits.
What's next
The plugin is updated often; its changelog lists every version 6 release, up to 6.36.31, tested with WordPress 7.1. New in recent versions: palette shades in OKLCH, print, dark-scheme and reduced-motion style conditions, design system export and import, and per-row sticky headers.
