one founder's story · Page Builder Sandwich
Building Page Builder Sandwich: Neil Lock
this one's about Neil Lock, Co-founder and developer · United Kingdom
posted · 2 min, roughly
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. It has been a WordPress page builder since 2015; version 6 started again from a blank page 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
A typical builder adds weight to every page and ties the content to itself. Whatever a page contains, it carries the builder's entire stylesheet and script, with markup buried in wrappers. And when the builder is switched off, shortcodes are what remains on the page.
What he built
So Page Builder Sandwich saves ordinary WordPress blocks, not shortcodes or a private format; the theme and SEO plugins read them, and pages keep their content without the plugin. Styles are loaded per page, only for the blocks present, from the site itself, and the Interactivity API of WordPress replaces jQuery for interactive blocks. 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 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. 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. Equally important was caching: front-end files keep their addresses across versions, so a cached page never breaks 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
The plugin is updated often; its changelog lists every version 6 release, up to 6.36.31, tested with WordPress 7.1. Lately it gained OKLCH shades of palette colours, conditions for print and dark schemes in the Style tab, design system import and export, and a mobile menu bar designer.
