From the workshop · Page Builder Sandwich
Neil Lock and a lighter way to build WordPress pages
Maker Neil Lock, Co-founder and developer · United Kingdom
Finished · 2 min at the bench
How it started
Page Builder Sandwich is a WordPress page builder that Neil Lock builds, developed, sold and supported by his company, Zinn Digital® Ltd. Its history reaches back to 2015, yet the current version 6 was rebuilt from scratch by the Zinn Digital® team. Neil builds his WordPress plugins to WordPress.org's standards, and the same team that runs the Zinn Digital® hosting maintains them.
The problem
The usual cost of a WordPress page builder is a heavier page and content you cannot easily take elsewhere. 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. And when the builder is switched off, shortcodes are what remains on the page.
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. 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. 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
The difficult bit was the existing content, so pages from versions 4 and 5 are turned into blocks in the background after updating, with their exact look kept. 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
The first years brought a free Lite version in January 2016, version 3.0 in October 2016 and version 4.0 on 16 January 2017, its first birthday. The current builder counts 112 blocks (44 of them free) and 28 website kits (20 free).
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 releases added OKLCH palette shades, style conditions for print, dark schemes and reduced motion, design system import and export, and per-row sticky headers.
