Nalu

WooCommerce ships a public REST API called the Store API. It has been in WooCommerce core since 2021, added to serve the block based cart, and it answers product, category, attribute and stock requests with no authentication. Nalu reads it at build time, from a server, at /wp-json/wc/store/v1/products, and turns the answer into static HTML.

That is the whole integration. No plugin to buy or install on WordPress, no API key to issue, no GraphQL endpoint to add, no scope to grant. If you go looking for the field where the key goes, there is not one. The only value the theme needs is WOO_STORE_URL, the address you already type into a browser. Store API v1 lands in WooCommerce 5.9, so any maintained shop is ready today.

The build reads the catalogue page by page: WordPress caps a request at one hundred products and returns one hundred rather than an error. Categories become aisles, product attributes become filters, and the collection-data endpoint supplies the price range and stock counts those filters need. A variable product keeps its options, and the combination a shopper picks carries its own variation id.

The cart lives in the browser and never calls the Store API to add, remove or count a line. At checkout it hands those lines to WooCommerce as a single URL, and WooCommerce rebuilds the cart and recomputes taxes, shipping and totals. One optional file, dropped into wp-content/mu-plugins, authorises that hand off; without it the catalogue still builds and ranks.

Leave WOO_STORE_URL empty and Nalu serves its own demo catalogue offline: eight products across four aisles, exercising the four WooCommerce product types. That is the state the archive ships in: unzip it and run it. When you do have a shop, pnpm woo:check reads it on plain Node and reports whether the catalogue is readable. Set an unreachable address and the build stops rather than quietly serving the demo: a real site on a fictional catalogue is worse than none.

The catalogue is frozen at the moment of the build. Publish a product in WooCommerce and it is not on the storefront until the site is built again; the same goes for a price or a stock status. That is what static HTML costs, and a page that lists only advantages is not worth reading.

The answer is a rebuild nobody has to remember: a deploy hook at your host, called by a WooCommerce webhook when a product changes, or a rebuild on a schedule. Nalu ships neither, because both belong to your host rather than to a theme. Stock is the case to weigh hardest, since a shop that sells out in minutes wants a short interval. Prices are the safe part: WooCommerce recomputes every total at checkout.