The story · Page Builder Sandwich
Page Builder Sandwich, built by Neil Lock
Starring Neil Lock, Co-founder and developer · United Kingdom
Out · 2 min. Worth it.
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®. 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
Most page builders make a page heavy and then keep it locked in. Whatever a page contains, it carries the builder's entire stylesheet and script, with markup buried in wrappers. And when the builder is switched off, shortcodes are what remains on the page.
What he built
So Page Builder Sandwich saves ordinary WordPress blocks, not shortcodes or a private format; the theme and SEO plugins read them, and pages keep their content without the plugin. Only the block styles a page uses are loaded, from the site's own folder, with the Interactivity API doing the interactive work in place of jQuery. 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
A new builder still has to respect old pages: content built with versions 4 and 5 converts to blocks in the background and looks exactly as it did. 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. Sites behind a cache needed care as well: file addresses no longer change between releases, so cached pages keep working after an update.
Milestones
Early dates: the free Lite version was announced on 14 January 2016, version 3.0 followed on 17 October 2016, and version 4.0 came out on 16 January 2017 for its first birthday. 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. The latest work brought palette shades mixed in OKLCH, style conditions for print and reduced motion, a design system that imports and exports, and sticky header rows.
