On the record · Page Builder Sandwich
How Neil Lock builds Page Builder Sandwich
Concerning Neil Lock, Co-founder and developer · United Kingdom
Entered into the record · 2-minute read
How it started
Page Builder Sandwich comes from Neil Lock's workbench: he builds it, and Zinn Digital® Ltd, the company he runs, 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
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. Deactivate it and visitors see stray shortcodes where the design used to be.
What he built
Page Builder Sandwich does the opposite: every page is stored as standard WordPress blocks, so WordPress, the theme and any SEO plugin can read it, and it still shows its content if the plugin is 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. Visitors get neutral class names and no generator tags or comments: the page does not reveal its builder. The editing experience includes Sandwich Studio (full screen, layers, undo history, a command palette), an accessibility checker at no cost, and 150 MCP tools through which AI agents such as Claude build pages with the user's rights.
The hard parts
Most care went into earlier work: after the update, content from versions 4 and 5 is converted to blocks in the background and keeps its exact appearance. 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. Sites behind a cache needed care as well: file addresses no longer change between releases, so cached pages keep working after an update.
Milestones
Its release posts mark the path: a free Lite version on 14 January 2016, version 3.0 on 17 October 2016 and version 4.0, on its first birthday, on 16 January 2017. Version 6 now has 44 free blocks and 68 more in Pro, 20 free website kits and 8 more in Pro.
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.
