Founder story, found · Page Builder Sandwich
From shortcodes to blocks: Neil Lock and Page Builder Sandwich
Found: Neil Lock, Co-founder and developer · United Kingdom
Added · 2 min read, start to end
How it started
Page Builder Sandwich is a WordPress page builder that Neil Lock builds, developed, sold and supported by his company, Zinn Digital® Ltd. The name goes back to 2015, but version 6 is a new builder from the ground up, made by the team at Zinn Digital®. On his own site, Neil describes his WordPress plugins as built to WordPress.org's standards, translated, and maintained by the team that runs his hosting.
The problem
Building with a page builder has often meant slower pages and content that only that builder understands. Pages ship the builder's whole stylesheet and script, and the HTML underneath is nested in builder wrappers. Once the builder goes, shortcodes stay behind in every page it touched.
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. 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. Visitors get neutral class names and no generator tags or comments: the page does not reveal its builder. 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
Rebuilding from scratch meant looking after existing sites: pages made with versions 4 and 5 are converted to blocks in the background and keep exactly the look they had. 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. To protect cached pages, scripts and stylesheets now keep one address from release to release, and an update never leaves a cached page pointing at a missing file.
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. 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. Lately it gained OKLCH shades of palette colours, conditions for print and dark schemes in the Style tab, design system import and export, and a mobile menu bar designer.
