Founder fact file · Page Builder Sandwich
From shortcodes to blocks: Neil Lock and Page Builder Sandwich
Founder Neil Lock, Co-founder and developer · United Kingdom
Dated · 2 min (est.)
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. Like the other WordPress plugins Neil builds, it is made to WordPress.org's standards and kept up by the team behind the Zinn Digital® hosting.
The problem
A typical builder adds weight to every page and ties the content to itself. 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
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. There is no global stylesheet: each page carries just the styles of its blocks, from the site's own uploads, and interactive blocks use the Interactivity API. Nothing in the markup names the builder: neutral class names, no generator tags, no HTML comments. 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
The hard part of a ground-up rebuild is the pages people already have: content made with versions 4 and 5 is converted to blocks in the background after the update and keeps its exact look. 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. 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
Early dates: the free Lite version was announced on 14 January 2016, version 3.0 followed on 17 October 2016, and version 4.0 came out on 16 January 2017 for its first birthday. There are now 112 blocks and 28 website kits in all, with 44 blocks and 20 kits in the free plugin.
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.
