A founding chapter · Page Builder Sandwich
Neil Lock on a page builder that leaves no trace
Chapter about Neil Lock, Co-founder and developer · United Kingdom
Begun · 2 min chapter
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. The name goes back to 2015, but version 6 is a new builder from the ground up, made by the team at Zinn Digital®. Neil builds his WordPress plugins to WordPress.org's standards, and the same team that runs the Zinn Digital® hosting maintains them.
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. Turning such a builder off leaves shortcodes all over the site.
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. 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. The front end carries neutral class names with no generator tags or HTML comments, so nothing on the page says which builder made it. 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. Measured on a clean WordPress test site on 2026-10-01, Page Builder Sandwich 6.28.0 added 0.5 kB to the page and no requests to other companies' servers, with Lighthouse on phones at 100 before and after. Equally important was caching: front-end files keep their addresses across versions, so a cached page never breaks after an update.
Milestones
The first years brought a free Lite version in January 2016, version 3.0 in October 2016 and version 4.0 on 16 January 2017, its first birthday. Version 6 now has 44 free blocks and 68 more in Pro, 20 free website kits and 8 more in Pro.
What's next
Development goes on in the open: the changelog records every version 6 release, and 6.36.31 is tested against 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.
