Profiled · Page Builder Sandwich
Neil Lock and a lighter way to build WordPress pages
Profiled: Neil Lock, Co-founder and developer · United Kingdom
Profiled on · 2-min profile
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. It has been a WordPress page builder since 2015; version 6 started again from a blank page 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
Building with a page builder has often meant slower pages and content that only that builder understands. Whatever a page contains, it carries the builder's entire stylesheet and script, with markup buried in wrappers. Switch the builder off, and shortcodes are left scattered through the content.
What he built
Page Builder Sandwich does the opposite: every page is stored as standard WordPress blocks, so WordPress, the theme and any SEO plugin can read it, and it still shows its content if the plugin is switched off. 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. He added Sandwich Studio, a full-screen editor with layers, undo history and a command palette, a free accessibility checker, and an MCP server whose 150 tools let Claude and other agents build pages as the signed-in user.
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. 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. 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. 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.
