Story · Page Builder Sandwich
How Neil Lock builds Page Builder Sandwich
Founder: Neil Lock, Co-founder and developer · United Kingdom
Date · 2 min
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. Its history reaches back to 2015, yet the current version 6 was rebuilt from scratch by the Zinn Digital® team. 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. Whatever a page contains, it carries the builder's entire stylesheet and script, with markup buried in wrappers. Deactivate it and visitors see stray shortcodes where the design used to be.
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. Styles are loaded per page, only for the blocks present, from the site itself, and the Interactivity API of WordPress replaces jQuery for interactive blocks. Nothing in the markup names the builder: neutral class names, no generator tags, no HTML comments. Builders get Sandwich Studio, a full-screen editor with layers, undo history and a command palette; an accessibility checker in the free plugin; and 150 MCP tools that let AI agents such as Claude work on pages within the user's permissions.
The hard parts
Rebuilding from scratch meant looking after existing sites: pages made with versions 4 and 5 are converted to blocks in the background and keep exactly the look they had. Rather than just calling it light, the team measured it on a clean WordPress test site on 1 October 2026: version 6.28.0 added 0.5 kB and no requests to other companies' servers, and the Lighthouse performance score on phones stayed at 100. 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
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. The current builder counts 112 blocks (44 of them free) and 28 website kits (20 free).
What's next
Releases keep coming, each one in the changelog, with 6.36.31 the newest and WordPress 7.1 tested. Recent releases added OKLCH palette shades, style conditions for print, dark schemes and reduced motion, design system import and export, and per-row sticky headers.
