From the grid · Page Builder Sandwich
Why Neil Lock builds Page Builder Sandwich on plain blocks
On the grid Neil Lock, Co-founder and developer · United Kingdom
Green flag · 2 min, flat out
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®. 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
Building with a page builder has often meant slower pages and content that only that builder understands. Every page loads the builder's whole stylesheet and script, and the markup is wrapped in layers of builder-specific HTML. Deactivate it and visitors see stray shortcodes where the design used to be.
What he built
Here every page is a set of normal WordPress blocks, which the theme and SEO plugins understand and which survive the plugin being switched off. Each page loads only the styles of the blocks on it, from the site's own uploads folder, and interactive blocks use WordPress's Interactivity API instead of jQuery. Class names are neutral and there are no generator tags or HTML comments, so the builder leaves no signature. 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
A new builder still has to respect old pages: content built with versions 4 and 5 converts to blocks in the background and looks exactly as it did. 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. To protect cached pages, scripts and stylesheets now keep one address from release to release, and an update never leaves a cached page pointing at a missing file.
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. Today the free plugin has 44 blocks and 20 website kits, and Pro adds 68 blocks and 8 kits.
What's next
Work continues release by release, and the changelog lists every version 6 release; the newest, 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.
