Owner's story · Page Builder Sandwich
Neil Lock on rebuilding a WordPress page builder from the ground up
Owner Neil Lock, Co-founder and developer · United Kingdom
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How it started
Page Builder Sandwich is a WordPress page builder that Neil Lock builds, developed, sold and supported by his company, Zinn Digital® Ltd. The name goes back to 2015, but version 6 is a new builder from the ground up, made by the team at Zinn Digital®. Like the other WordPress plugins Neil builds, it is made to WordPress.org's standards and kept up by the team behind the Zinn Digital® hosting.
The problem
Page builders have a habit of slowing pages down and holding content hostage. Pages ship the builder's whole stylesheet and script, and the HTML underneath is nested in builder wrappers. Switch the builder off, and shortcodes are left scattered through the content.
What he built
So Page Builder Sandwich saves ordinary WordPress blocks, not shortcodes or a private format; the theme and SEO plugins read them, and pages keep their content without the plugin. There is no global stylesheet: each page carries just the styles of its blocks, from the site's own uploads, and interactive blocks use the Interactivity API. Class names are neutral and there are no generator tags or HTML comments, so the builder leaves no signature. The editing experience includes Sandwich Studio (full screen, layers, undo history, a command palette), an accessibility checker at no cost, and 150 MCP tools through which AI agents such as Claude build pages with the user's rights.
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. Updates had to be safe for cached sites too: script and stylesheet addresses stay the same across releases, so a page a cache saved before an update never points at a missing file.
Milestones
Along the way, a free Lite version arrived on 14 January 2016, version 3.0 rethought the interface on 17 October 2016, and version 4.0 marked the product's first birthday on 16 January 2017. The current builder counts 112 blocks (44 of them free) and 28 website kits (20 free).
What's next
Work continues release by release, and the changelog lists every version 6 release; the newest, 6.36.31, is tested with WordPress 7.1. Recent versions added a mobile menu bar designer, per-row sticky headers, OKLCH palette shades and style conditions for print, dark schemes and reduced motion.
