Asteris Utility Suite

Asteris Utility Suite is the free edition of the Asteris suite. Five modules, no bloat, no upsell popups, no phone-home.

Install one plugin instead of five. Toggle modules on or off from a single dashboard. Each module does one job well and stays out of the way when you don’t need it.

What’s included:

• SMTP — send mail through your own SMTP server. Plug in Gmail / Outlook / SendGrid / Mailgun credentials, see a log of the last 50 sends.
• Image Optimisation — automatic WebP + AVIF conversion on upload and bulk-optimise your whole existing media library (background queue, pause/resume). Smart <picture> serving sends each browser the smallest format it supports, and a derivative is only kept if it’s actually smaller. Original backup + one-click restore.
• Analytics + Pixels — GA4 tag, Meta Pixel, basic Consent Mode v2. Loaded only on front-end pages, deferred to avoid blocking render.
• Activity Log — 30 day audit trail of admin actions: user logins, plugin activations, option changes, post edits. Filterable, exportable as JSON.
• Accessibility Scanner — page-by-page WCAG findings report. Catches missing alt text, low-contrast headings, skipped heading levels, links without descriptive text.

Looking for more? Asteris Utility Suite (paid) adds Security + Login, full SEO + AI suite, page caching with advanced-cache.php drop-in, scheduled cloud backups, the full Forms engine, link cloaking, and per-site Insights. See asteriscommerce.com/asteris-utility-suite.

Privacy: Asteris Utility Suite makes no outbound network calls by default. No telemetry, no licence check, no analytics on you. The Analytics + Pixels module is the only outbound traffic it ever generates — and only when you explicitly configure a tracking ID.

Why Asteris Utility Suite?

Built lean on purpose. Here’s what you actually get:

1. Tiny footprint — about 160 KB zipped. Most “all-in-one” suites are 10-40 MB.
2. One plugin instead of six — one thing to update, one settings area, one conflict surface instead of six separate plugins.
3. Only runs what you turn on — every module toggles independently, and disabled modules load no code at all.
4. Nothing loads on the front end unless it’s needed — the analytics tags are deferred and only output once you’ve actually set a tracking ID.
5. No phone-home — zero telemetry, no licence check, no usage data sent anywhere. The only outbound traffic is the tracking pixels you choose to switch on.
6. Modern, efficient code — built for PHP 8.1+, no jQuery dependency, no heavy framework bundled.
7. Your data stays yours — everything installs and runs on your own server. Not SaaS, no account required.
8. GPL-2.0 — audit it, fork it, keep it forever.
9. No nag screens — the paid edition is mentioned once, never as a pop-up or a locked button.
10. Built by people who run real sites — five years of agency work behind it, not a weekend side project.

Upgrade to Asteris Utility Suite (Pro)

The free plugin is complete and stays free. When you need more, the paid version adds the heavier modules — same one-plugin, no-bloat philosophy:

• Security + Login — brute-force throttling, 2FA, passkeys, malware + vulnerability scanners
• SEO + AI Suite — meta, schema, sitemaps, llms.txt, AI content generator, Search Console integration
• Performance — page caching with an advanced-cache.php drop-in, Core Web Vitals monitor, HTML rewriter
• Backups — streaming database dumps, file archives, cloud destinations, one-click restore + clone sandbox
• Forms — a full form builder with uploads, signatures, calculations and webhooks
• Links — affiliate link cloaker + click tracker
• Insights — per-site visitor analytics, plus the two-way Data sources (Search Console, Bing, GA4 Data API)
• AI Suite — AI content helpers: long copy, excerpts, SEO meta, and image alt text from a brief + your keywords (bring-your-own AI key)
• Duplicate Post — one-click clone of any post, page, or custom post type, with taxonomies and custom fields copied to a fresh draft
• The Pro tier of all five free modules

One standard price, no per-site upsells, the same lightweight build. See everything included at asteriscommerce.com/asteris-utility-suite.

External services

Asteris Utility Suite does not connect to any external service on its own. Three optional integrations inside the Analytics + Pixels module load third-party scripts only when YOU paste in the relevant tracking ID via Asteris → Analytics + Pixels:

Google Analytics 4 (GA4) + Google Tag Manager (GTM)
* What: Tracks pageviews + events for your own analytics dashboards.
* When: A request is sent to www.googletagmanager.com on every front-end page load once you save a GA4 Measurement ID and/or a GTM Container ID.
* Data sent: Standard browser pageview ping (URL, referrer, user agent, screen size, language) plus any custom events you trigger.
* Provided by Google. Terms of Service · Privacy Policy

Meta Pixel (Facebook)
* What: Tracks pageviews + conversions for Meta ad campaigns.
* When: A request is sent to connect.facebook.net and www.facebook.com/tr on every front-end page load once you save a Meta Pixel ID.
* Data sent: Standard pageview ping plus any custom events you trigger.
* Provided by Meta Platforms, Inc. Business Tools Terms · Privacy Policy

If you do not enter a tracking ID for a given integration, no requests to that service are sent.

SMTP mail server (you choose the provider)
* What: When the SMTP module is enabled, outgoing site email (wp_mail()) is delivered through the SMTP server you configure — for example Gmail, Outlook, Amazon SES, SendGrid, Mailgun, or any other SMTP host.
* When: A connection is made to your configured SMTP host only at the moment WordPress sends an email, and only after you have entered host/credentials and enabled the module.
* Data sent: The contents of the emails your site sends (recipient, subject, body, headers) plus the authentication credentials you supply, transmitted to the host you nominated.
* Provided by the third-party mail provider you select. Review that provider’s own terms and privacy policy (e.g. Amazon SES, SendGrid, Mailgun). No mail is sent to any Asteris-operated server at any point.

Translations

Asteris Utility Suite is translation-ready. The plugin ships with a .pot file in /languages/. To contribute a translation, visit translate.wordpress.org/projects/wp-plugins/asteris-utility-suite.