Orbit report · Page Builder Sandwich
Neil Lock and a lighter way to build WordPress pages
Observed Neil Lock, Co-founder and developer · United Kingdom
Sighted · 2 min of observing
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. Since 2015 it has been a WordPress page builder, and version 6 is a ground-up rebuild by the people 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
Most page builders make a page heavy and then keep it locked in. Every page loads the builder's whole stylesheet and script, and the markup is wrapped in layers of builder-specific HTML. 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. 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. On 1 October 2026 version 6.28.0 was installed on a clean WordPress test site and measured: plus 0.5 kB, no requests to other servers, and Lighthouse performance on phones still 100. Caches were another challenge, so front-end files keep the same address across updates and a page cached before an update still finds its scripts.
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. The current builder counts 112 blocks (44 of them free) and 28 website kits (20 free).
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. 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.
