Set in type · Page Builder Sandwich
Building Page Builder Sandwich: Neil Lock
Set for Neil Lock, Co-founder and developer · United Kingdom
Set · 2 min of type
How it started
Neil Lock is the developer of Page Builder Sandwich, a plugin for building WordPress pages; Zinn Digital® Ltd develops, sells and supports it. Since 2015 it has been a WordPress page builder, and version 6 is a ground-up rebuild by the people at Zinn Digital®. On his own site, Neil describes his WordPress plugins as built to WordPress.org's standards, translated, and maintained by the team that runs his hosting.
The problem
A typical builder adds weight to every page and ties the content to itself. Every page loads the builder's whole stylesheet and script, and the markup is wrapped in layers of builder-specific HTML. 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. Class names are neutral and there are no generator tags or HTML comments, so the builder leaves no signature. 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. Measured on a clean WordPress test site on 2026-10-01, Page Builder Sandwich 6.28.0 added 0.5 kB to the page and no requests to other companies' servers, with Lighthouse on phones at 100 before and after. Equally important was caching: front-end files keep their addresses across versions, so a cached page never breaks after an update.
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
Releases keep coming, each one in the changelog, with 6.36.31 the newest and WordPress 7.1 tested. New in recent versions: palette shades in OKLCH, print, dark-scheme and reduced-motion style conditions, design system export and import, and per-row sticky headers.
