Mission log · Page Builder Sandwich
From shortcodes to blocks: Neil Lock and Page Builder Sandwich
Crew member Neil Lock, Co-founder and developer · United Kingdom
Launched · Flight time: 2 min
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. Page Builder Sandwich first appeared in 2015, and with version 6 the Zinn Digital® team built it again from the ground up. Neil builds his WordPress plugins to WordPress.org's standards, and the same team that runs the Zinn Digital® hosting maintains them.
The problem
The usual cost of a WordPress page builder is a heavier page and content you cannot easily take elsewhere. Whatever a page contains, it carries the builder's entire stylesheet and script, with markup buried in wrappers. 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. Class names are neutral and there are no generator tags or HTML comments, so the builder leaves no signature. 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
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. The proof is a measurement on a clean WordPress test site (1 October 2026, version 6.28.0): 0.5 kB more, 0 third-party requests, phone Lighthouse performance 100 before and 100 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
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. Today the free plugin has 44 blocks and 20 website kits, and Pro adds 68 blocks and 8 kits.
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 versions added a mobile menu bar designer, per-row sticky headers, OKLCH palette shades and style conditions for print, dark schemes and reduced motion.
