Why I built Asteris for WordPress

I’m Nick Lord. I’m in Sydney, Australia. I run WordPress sites, and I built Asteris for WordPress because I got sick of being my own integration tester every Tuesday.

That’s the short version. The longer one is below.

Who I am

Small, tight team. One product. One support inbox.

I’m not a big plugin company. I run a small team out of Sydney through an Australian Pty Ltd (My Cosmic Message Pty Ltd t/a Asteris Commerce, ABN 30 652 358 159). No VC. No marketing team. No growth hacker — by design. v1.0 is a small team owning every line of code, every support reply, every roadmap call. The team scales further when the product earns it.

I’ve been building WordPress sites for years — my own blog, business sites, project sites, and a handful for other people. I know what a real WP install looks like at month six, when you’ve accreted twelve plugins, three of them are abandoned, and one of them throws a PHP warning every time someone loads the dashboard.

That’s the world Asteris was built in.

The problem I ran into

If you’ve run a WordPress site for more than a year, you already know this story. I’ll tell it anyway because the maths is worth seeing on the page.

A typical considered-content WordPress site ends up with something like this:

By the time you tally it up, you’re north of $1,100 a year. I checked the numbers on my own sites and they were worse than that, because I’d been buying lifetime deals on AppSumo and Mac Heist and forgetting which ones had expired.

The money isn’t even the worst part. The worst part is Tuesday update day.

Every Tuesday I’d open WP Admin, see the red update badge, and feel my stomach tighten. Updating plugins on a live site is Russian roulette when you have a dozen of them from ten different vendors, each with their own release cycle, their own JavaScript bundle, their own opinion about how the dashboard should render.

The performance tax was the slow grind. Most of the multi-plugin stack I was paying for was built the same way: heavy admin pages, scripts loading on the front end whether you used the feature or not, queries running on every page request for things that should have been cached or static. I got sick of how they were being built. That’s the conflict that pushed me into building this — not one catastrophic break, the slow grinding tax I was paying on every page load, on every site I ran.

Support across that many vendors is its own job. Three of them only answer in business hours that aren’t your business hours. Two of them have a forum where the last reply was 2019. One of them got acquired and the new owner doesn’t reply at all.

I wanted one plugin. So I built it.

What Asteris for WordPress is

One WordPress plugin. 11 modules at v1.0. One settings panel, one update cycle, one licence, one inbox to email when something breaks.

The 11 modules cover what a real WordPress site actually needs: security with 2FA, SEO with AI-powered content tools, performance caching + asset optimisation, forms with anti-spam, reliable SMTP with delivery logs, activity log + site health diagnostics, GA4 + GTM + social pixels, image optimisation with WebP/AVIF, backups + migration, code snippets manager, and a WCAG accessibility auditor. Six of them are available free on WordPress.org as Asteris for WordPress Free — Code Snippets (full) plus lite versions of Image Optimisation, Analytics + Pixels, Activity Log, SMTP, and the Accessibility scanner.

The paid version unlocks the rest plus the full versions of the lite modules. Pricing is on the pricing page; the short version is Starter at $149/yr (1 site), Pro at $349/yr (3 sites), and Agency at $549/yr (10 sites). Subscribe during the launch window and that price stays locked for as long as your subscription stays active. The first 500 launch subscribers are the Founder cohort — same locked rate, same compounding savings, plus a Founder badge in the customer portal and direct say on the v1.x roadmap.

That’s what it is.

What Asteris for WordPress is not

This part matters more than the feature list, so I’m putting it in its own section.

It’s not a page builder. I’m not competing with Elementor, Bricks, or Beaver Builder. Asteris assumes you already have a theme and a builder you like — and we ship integrations with all four major builders plus Gutenberg and the classic editor.

It’s not an LMS or a membership plugin. LearnDash, LifterLMS, MemberPress, Paid Memberships Pro all handle that better than a general-purpose plugin would. I’m not going to reinvent them.

It’s not a translation plugin. WPML and Polylang are mature, well-maintained, and the right tool for multilingual sites. Asteris co-exists with both.

It’s not a commerce plugin. If you run a WooCommerce store and want one suite that covers SEO + product filtering + variation swatches + invoices + the rest of the store-stack pain, that’s Asteris for WooCommerce — sister product, same team, same engineering bar. You can run both side-by-side on the same site if you have both a content layer and a store layer.

It’s not Multisite-ready at v1.0. It might be later. It isn’t now. If you need WP Multisite, this isn’t the plugin yet.

It’s not finished. v1.0 ships with 11 modules. The roadmap has more. Some of what’s on the roadmap will change because Founders tell me to change it.

I’d rather you walk away on this page than buy and feel misled.

How it gets built

Lean, weekly, in public.

I ship every Friday. The cadence is locked — even if the release is small, there’s a release. The changelog is the source of truth; I update it the same day code goes out.

The roadmap is public and honest. Items that are committed are marked committed. Items that are “maybe” are marked maybe. Things I’ve deprioritised are still listed with a note saying why, so you don’t have to guess whether I forgot.

Fridays are release day. Mondays are Founder-feedback triage.

When a Founder customer sends a bug report or a feature request, it goes into the same queue I work from. I read every one. Not every one gets built — some don’t fit the product, some fit but get queued behind higher-impact work — but every one gets a reply explaining which bucket it landed in.

That feedback loop is the actual value of the Founder cohort. The locked launch price is nice. The compounding savings as regular pricing rises is nicer. But the leverage on what Asteris becomes is the real thing.

Who it’s for

Considered-content WordPress site owners who:

Agencies who manage 3-10 client sites and want one licence stack across all of them. The Agency tier exists for you.

Who it’s not for

How to reach me

Direct line, in order of how I’d prefer you use them:

I’m on Sydney time (AEST/AEDT). If you email me at 3am my time, expect a reply when the sun comes up.

Feedback emails get my attention fastest — what’s working well, what could be better, and what’s missing.

The deal, stated plainly

Asteris for WordPress is in active development. As an early customer, you’re shaping it. Your bug reports and feedback are part of the deal — and so are all future updates at your locked launch price, for as long as you stay subscribed.

That’s the agreement. If it sounds like the kind of thing you want to be part of, the Founder cohort is open until the 500-subscriber cap is hit.

If not, Asteris for WordPress Free on WordPress.org is six real modules, no time limit, no upsell wall.

Either way — thanks for reading this far.

— Nick
Sydney, Australia