Founding, on record · Page Builder Sandwich
Neil Lock and a lighter way to build WordPress pages
Record holder Neil Lock, Co-founder and developer · United Kingdom
Recorded · 2 min read (estimate)
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. It has been a WordPress page builder since 2015; version 6 started again from a blank page 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. Deactivate it and visitors see stray shortcodes where the design used to be.
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. Only the block styles a page uses are loaded, from the site's own folder, with the Interactivity API doing the interactive work in place of jQuery. The finished HTML has neutral class names and carries no generator tag or comment pointing back to the builder. For the people building, there is Sandwich Studio, a full-screen editor with a layers panel, undo history and a command palette, a free accessibility checker, and an MCP server with 150 tools so Claude and other AI agents can build pages with the user's own 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. Rather than just calling it light, the team measured it on a clean WordPress test site on 1 October 2026: version 6.28.0 added 0.5 kB and no requests to other companies' servers, and the Lighthouse performance score on phones stayed at 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. Version 6 now has 44 free blocks and 68 more in Pro, 20 free website kits and 8 more in Pro.
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. 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.
