Founder side · Page Builder Sandwich
Neil Lock and a lighter way to build WordPress pages
On Neil Lock, Co-founder and developer · United Kingdom
Written · 2 min to read
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. The name goes back to 2015, but version 6 is a new builder from the ground up, made by the team at Zinn Digital®. 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. Deactivate it and visitors see stray shortcodes where the design used to be.
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. 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. Visitors get neutral class names and no generator tags or comments: the page does not reveal its builder. On the editing side, Sandwich Studio offers a full-screen canvas with layers, undo history and a command palette, a free checker flags accessibility problems, and AI agents like Claude get 150 MCP tools, limited to what the user may do.
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. 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
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
Development goes on in the open: the changelog records every version 6 release, and 6.36.31 is tested against WordPress 7.1. 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.
