Shopkeeper's story · Page Builder Sandwich
Why Neil Lock builds Page Builder Sandwich on plain blocks
The shopkeeper Neil Lock, Co-founder and developer · United Kingdom
Opened · 2 min browse, no hurry
How it started
Neil Lock builds Page Builder Sandwich, a page builder for WordPress, and his company Zinn Digital® Ltd develops, sells and supports it. It has been a WordPress page builder since 2015; version 6 started again from a blank page 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
A typical builder adds weight to every page and ties the content to itself. 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
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. 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. Nothing in the markup names the builder: neutral class names, no generator tags, no HTML comments. 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
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. The proof is a measurement on a clean WordPress test site (1 October 2026, version 6.28.0): 0.5 kB more, 0 third-party requests, phone Lighthouse performance 100 before and 100 after. Equally important was caching: front-end files keep their addresses across versions, so a cached page never breaks after an update.
Milestones
Along the way, a free Lite version arrived on 14 January 2016, version 3.0 rethought the interface on 17 October 2016, and version 4.0 marked the product's first birthday on 16 January 2017. 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.
