Maker story · Page Builder Sandwich
Neil Lock on a page builder that leaves no trace
Maker Neil Lock, Co-founder and developer · United Kingdom
Posted · 2 minutes, maker to maker
How it started
The WordPress page builder Page Builder Sandwich is built by Neil Lock and developed, sold and supported by Zinn Digital® Ltd, his company. It has been a WordPress page builder since 2015; version 6 started again from a blank page at Zinn Digital®. On his own site, Neil describes his WordPress plugins as built to WordPress.org's standards, translated, and maintained by the team that runs his 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. Only the block styles a page uses are loaded, from the site's own folder, with the Interactivity API doing the interactive work in place of jQuery. Visitors get neutral class names and no generator tags or comments: the page does not reveal its builder. On the editing side, Sandwich Studio offers a full-screen canvas with layers, undo history and a command palette, a free checker flags accessibility problems, and AI agents like Claude get 150 MCP tools, limited to what the user may do.
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. Rather than just calling it light, the team measured it on a clean WordPress test site on 1 October 2026: version 6.28.0 added 0.5 kB and no requests to other companies' servers, and the Lighthouse performance score on phones stayed at 100. 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. Version 6 ships 44 free blocks and 20 free kits, with Pro bringing the totals to 112 blocks and 28 kits.
What's next
The plugin is updated often; its changelog lists every version 6 release, up to 6.36.31, 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.
