Founder file · Page Builder Sandwich
Building Page Builder Sandwich: Neil Lock
Subject Neil Lock, Co-founder and developer · United Kingdom
Filed · Reading time: 2 minutes
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. The name goes back to 2015, but version 6 is a new builder from the ground up, made by the team 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. The builder's complete stylesheet and script ride along on every page, wrapped around content in builder-only HTML. Turning such a builder off leaves shortcodes all over the site.
What he built
Version 6 keeps pages as plain WordPress blocks: no shortcodes, no private format, and nothing lost if the plugin is ever 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. The front end carries neutral class names with no generator tags or HTML comments, so nothing on the page says which builder made it. The editing experience includes Sandwich Studio (full screen, layers, undo history, a command palette), an accessibility checker at no cost, and 150 MCP tools through which AI agents such as Claude build pages with the user's rights.
The hard parts
A new builder still has to respect old pages: content built with versions 4 and 5 converts to blocks in the background and looks exactly as it did. 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
Its release posts mark the path: a free Lite version on 14 January 2016, version 3.0 on 17 October 2016 and version 4.0, on its first birthday, on 16 January 2017. The current builder counts 112 blocks (44 of them free) and 28 website kits (20 free).
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. Recent releases added OKLCH palette shades, style conditions for print, dark schemes and reduced motion, design system import and export, and per-row sticky headers.
