Paddock story · Page Builder Sandwich
Neil Lock on rebuilding a WordPress page builder from the ground up
Driver Neil Lock, Co-founder and developer · United Kingdom
Lights out · 2 min, lights to flag
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. Since 2015 it has been a WordPress page builder, and version 6 is a ground-up rebuild by the people at Zinn Digital®. It sits with the other plugins Neil builds: made to WordPress.org's standards, translated, and maintained by the people who run the Zinn Digital® hosting.
The problem
The usual cost of a WordPress page builder is a heavier page and content you cannot easily take elsewhere. The builder's complete stylesheet and script ride along on every page, wrapped around content in builder-only HTML. Turning such a builder off leaves shortcodes all over the site.
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. 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. Class names are neutral and there are no generator tags or HTML comments, so the builder leaves no signature. 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. 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. Sites behind a cache needed care as well: file addresses no longer change between releases, so cached pages keep working after an update.
Milestones
A free Lite version (14 January 2016), a redesigned version 3.0 (17 October 2016) and version 4.0 on its first birthday (16 January 2017) were the early steps. Version 6 ships 44 free blocks and 20 free kits, with Pro bringing the totals to 112 blocks and 28 kits.
What's next
Releases keep coming, each one in the changelog, with 6.36.31 the newest and WordPress 7.1 tested. New in recent versions: palette shades in OKLCH, print, dark-scheme and reduced-motion style conditions, design system export and import, and per-row sticky headers.
