Story, listed · Page Builder Sandwich
Building Page Builder Sandwich: Neil Lock
Listed founder Neil Lock, Co-founder and developer · United Kingdom
Listed · Read time: 2 min
How it started
Neil Lock builds Page Builder Sandwich, a page builder for WordPress, and his company Zinn Digital® Ltd develops, sells and supports it. Its history reaches back to 2015, yet the current version 6 was rebuilt from scratch by the Zinn Digital® team. Neil writes that his plugins follow WordPress.org's standards and are looked after by the same team that runs the Zinn Digital® hosting.
The problem
A typical builder adds weight to every page and ties the content to itself. The builder's complete stylesheet and script ride along on every page, wrapped around content in builder-only HTML. And when the builder is switched off, shortcodes are what remains on the page.
What he built
Version 6 keeps pages as plain WordPress blocks: no shortcodes, no private format, and nothing lost if the plugin is ever 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. 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
The difficult bit was the existing content, so pages from versions 4 and 5 are turned into blocks in the background after updating, with their exact look kept. On 1 October 2026 version 6.28.0 was installed on a clean WordPress test site and measured: plus 0.5 kB, no requests to other servers, and Lighthouse performance on phones still 100. 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
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. There are now 112 blocks and 28 website kits in all, with 44 blocks and 20 kits in the free plugin.
What's next
Page Builder Sandwich keeps shipping: every version 6 release is in the public changelog, and version 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.
