Entrant story · Page Builder Sandwich
Page Builder Sandwich: the story of its developer, Neil Lock
Entrant founder Neil Lock, Co-founder and developer · United Kingdom
Entered · Reading time 2 min
How it started
Neil Lock builds Page Builder Sandwich, a page builder for WordPress, and his company Zinn Digital® Ltd develops, sells and supports it. Its history reaches back to 2015, yet the current version 6 was rebuilt from scratch by the Zinn Digital® team. 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. Each page pulls in the builder's full stylesheet and script, and the content sits inside layer after layer of the builder's own markup. And when the builder is switched off, shortcodes are what remains on the page.
What he built
The answer was to store everything as standard WordPress blocks, readable by WordPress, the theme and SEO plugins, with the content intact even when the plugin is off. 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. Class names are neutral and there are no generator tags or HTML comments, so the builder leaves no signature. 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. Updates had to be safe for cached sites too: script and stylesheet addresses stay the same across releases, so a page a cache saved before an update never points at a missing file.
Milestones
Along the way, a free Lite version arrived on 14 January 2016, version 3.0 rethought the interface on 17 October 2016, and version 4.0 marked the product's first birthday on 16 January 2017. 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.
