Story on file · Page Builder Sandwich
Page Builder Sandwich: the story of its developer, Neil Lock
Person on file Neil Lock, Co-founder and developer · United Kingdom
Placed on file · File length: 2 min
How it started
Page Builder Sandwich comes from Neil Lock's workbench: he builds it, and Zinn Digital® Ltd, the company he runs, develops, sells and supports it. 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. Whatever a page contains, it carries the builder's entire stylesheet and script, with markup buried in wrappers. Deactivate it and visitors see stray shortcodes where the design used to be.
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. 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. Visitors get neutral class names and no generator tags or comments: the page does not reveal its builder. 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
Most care went into earlier work: after the update, content from versions 4 and 5 is converted to blocks in the background and keeps its exact appearance. 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. 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
Early dates: the free Lite version was announced on 14 January 2016, version 3.0 followed on 17 October 2016, and version 4.0 came out on 16 January 2017 for its first birthday. 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. 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.
