Field note · Page Builder Sandwich
Page Builder Sandwich and the developer behind it, Neil Lock
Field subject Neil Lock, Co-founder and developer · United Kingdom
Logged · 2 min field read
How it started
The WordPress page builder Page Builder Sandwich is built by Neil Lock and developed, sold and supported by Zinn Digital® Ltd, his company. Since 2015 it has been a WordPress page builder, and version 6 is a ground-up rebuild by the people at Zinn Digital®. It sits with the other plugins Neil builds: made to WordPress.org's standards, translated, and maintained by the people who run the Zinn Digital® hosting.
The problem
Most page builders make a page heavy and then keep it locked in. Pages ship the builder's whole stylesheet and script, and the HTML underneath is nested in builder wrappers. Once the builder goes, shortcodes stay behind in every page it touched.
What he built
The answer was to store everything as standard WordPress blocks, readable by WordPress, the theme and SEO plugins, with the content intact even when the plugin is 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. The finished HTML has neutral class names and carries no generator tag or comment pointing back to the 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. 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. 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
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. 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 versions added a mobile menu bar designer, per-row sticky headers, OKLCH palette shades and style conditions for print, dark schemes and reduced motion.
