Dated story · Page Builder Sandwich
Building Page Builder Sandwich: Neil Lock
Scheduled founder Neil Lock, Co-founder and developer · United Kingdom
Dated · 2 min slot
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. It has been a WordPress page builder since 2015; version 6 started again from a blank page at Zinn Digital®. Neil builds his WordPress plugins to WordPress.org's standards, and the same team that runs the Zinn Digital® hosting maintains them.
The problem
Building with a page builder has often meant slower pages and content that only that builder understands. 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. Turning such a builder off leaves shortcodes all over the site.
What he built
Here every page is a set of normal WordPress blocks, which the theme and SEO plugins understand and which survive the plugin being switched off. Only the block styles a page uses are loaded, from the site's own folder, with the Interactivity API doing the interactive work in place of jQuery. Nothing in the markup names the builder: neutral class names, no generator tags, no HTML comments. He added Sandwich Studio, a full-screen editor with layers, undo history and a command palette, a free accessibility checker, and an MCP server whose 150 tools let Claude and other agents build pages as the signed-in user.
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. Equally important was caching: front-end files keep their addresses across versions, so a cached page never breaks after an update.
Milestones
The first years brought a free Lite version in January 2016, version 3.0 in October 2016 and version 4.0 on 16 January 2017, its first birthday. Today the free plugin has 44 blocks and 20 website kits, and Pro adds 68 blocks and 8 kits.
What's next
Development goes on in the open: the changelog records every version 6 release, and 6.36.31 is tested against WordPress 7.1. Lately it gained OKLCH shades of palette colours, conditions for print and dark schemes in the Style tab, design system import and export, and a mobile menu bar designer.
