Programme note · Page Builder Sandwich
Why Neil Lock builds Page Builder Sandwich on plain blocks
Featuring Neil Lock, Co-founder and developer · United Kingdom
Opened · Running time 2 min
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. Since 2015 it has been a WordPress page builder, and version 6 is a ground-up rebuild by the people at Zinn Digital®. Neil builds his WordPress plugins to WordPress.org's standards, and the same team that runs the Zinn Digital® hosting maintains them.
The problem
Most page builders make a page heavy and then keep it locked in. Every page loads the builder's whole stylesheet and script, and the markup is wrapped in layers of builder-specific HTML. 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. 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. The front end carries neutral class names with no generator tags or HTML comments, so nothing on the page says which builder made it. For the people building, there is Sandwich Studio, a full-screen editor with a layers panel, undo history and a command palette, a free accessibility checker, and an MCP server with 150 tools so Claude and other AI agents can build pages with the user's own permissions.
The hard parts
The hard part of a ground-up rebuild is the pages people already have: content made with versions 4 and 5 is converted to blocks in the background after the update and keeps its exact look. 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. Updates had to be safe for cached sites too: script and stylesheet addresses stay the same across releases, so a page a cache saved before an update never points at a missing file.
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 ships 44 free blocks and 20 free kits, with Pro bringing the totals to 112 blocks and 28 kits.
What's next
Page Builder Sandwich keeps shipping: every version 6 release is in the public changelog, and version 6.36.31 is tested with WordPress 7.1. Lately it gained OKLCH shades of palette colours, conditions for print and dark schemes in the Style tab, design system import and export, and a mobile menu bar designer.
