Founder story · Page Builder Sandwich
Page Builder Sandwich, built by Neil Lock
Featuring Neil Lock, Co-founder and developer · United Kingdom
First published · 2 min read
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 writes that his plugins follow WordPress.org's standards and are looked after by the same team that runs the Zinn Digital® hosting.
The problem
Building with a page builder has often meant slower pages and content that only that builder understands. Every page loads the builder's whole stylesheet and script, and the markup is wrapped in layers of builder-specific HTML. Once the builder goes, shortcodes stay behind in every page it touched.
What he built
Here every page is a set of normal WordPress blocks, which the theme and SEO plugins understand and which survive the plugin being switched off. Each page loads only the styles of the blocks on it, from the site's own uploads folder, and interactive blocks use WordPress's Interactivity API instead of jQuery. Visitors get neutral class names and no generator tags or comments: the page does not reveal its builder. 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
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. 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. 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
Page Builder Sandwich keeps shipping: every version 6 release is in the public changelog, and version 6.36.31 is 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.
