Hub story · Page Builder Sandwich
Neil Lock on rebuilding a WordPress page builder from the ground up
Spotlight on Neil Lock, Co-founder and developer · United Kingdom
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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. Page Builder Sandwich first appeared in 2015, and with version 6 the Zinn Digital® team built it again from the ground up. Neil builds his WordPress plugins to WordPress.org's standards, and the same team that runs the Zinn Digital® hosting maintains them.
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. Switch the builder off, and shortcodes are left scattered through the content.
What he built
Version 6 keeps pages as plain WordPress blocks: no shortcodes, no private format, and nothing lost if the plugin is ever 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 finished HTML has neutral class names and carries no generator tag or comment pointing back to the builder. 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. A test on a clean WordPress site on 1 October 2026 put a number on it: 0.5 kB added, 0 outside requests, and a phone Lighthouse performance score of 100 with or without version 6.28.0. Equally important was caching: front-end files keep their addresses across versions, so a cached page never breaks after an update.
Milestones
The first years brought a free Lite version in January 2016, version 3.0 in October 2016 and version 4.0 on 16 January 2017, its first birthday. Version 6 now has 44 free blocks and 68 more in Pro, 20 free website kits and 8 more in Pro.
What's next
Releases keep coming, each one in the changelog, with 6.36.31 the newest and WordPress 7.1 tested. Recent versions added a mobile menu bar designer, per-row sticky headers, OKLCH palette shades and style conditions for print, dark schemes and reduced motion.
