Founding log · Page Builder Sandwich
How Neil Lock builds Page Builder Sandwich
Subject Neil Lock, Co-founder and developer · United Kingdom
Committed · 2 min 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. 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
Most page builders make a page heavy and then keep it locked in. 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. Switch the builder off, and shortcodes are left scattered through the content.
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. A page gets only the CSS its own blocks need, served from the site's uploads folder, and interactive parts run on WordPress's Interactivity API rather than jQuery. The front end carries neutral class names with no generator tags or HTML comments, so nothing on the page says which builder made it. 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
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. On 1 October 2026 version 6.28.0 was installed on a clean WordPress test site and measured: plus 0.5 kB, no requests to other servers, and Lighthouse performance on phones still 100. Caches were another challenge, so front-end files keep the same address across updates and a page cached before an update still finds its scripts.
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. Version 6 ships 44 free blocks and 20 free kits, with Pro bringing the totals to 112 blocks and 28 kits.
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.
