First look · Page Builder Sandwich
Neil Lock on a page builder that leaves no trace
First person: Neil Lock, Co-founder and developer · United Kingdom
First seen · 2 min first read
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. Page Builder Sandwich first appeared in 2015, and with version 6 the Zinn Digital® team built it again from the ground up. 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
Page builders have a habit of slowing pages down and holding content hostage. Pages ship the builder's whole stylesheet and script, and the HTML underneath is nested in builder wrappers. Turning such a builder off leaves shortcodes all over the site.
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. 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. The front end carries neutral class names with no generator tags or HTML comments, so nothing on the page says which builder made it. Builders get Sandwich Studio, a full-screen editor with layers, undo history and a command palette; an accessibility checker in the free plugin; and 150 MCP tools that let AI agents such as Claude work on pages within the user's permissions.
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. 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
Its release posts mark the path: a free Lite version on 14 January 2016, version 3.0 on 17 October 2016 and version 4.0, on its first birthday, on 16 January 2017. Today the free plugin has 44 blocks and 20 website kits, and Pro adds 68 blocks and 8 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. 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.
