Connect your WooCommerce store to Clione

Plans: Starter ✓ · Growth ✓ · Pro ✓ · Agency ✓

You need: an administrator account on your WordPress site, WooCommerce installed, and the site served over https.

A WooCommerce store connects with two things: a REST API key you create in WooCommerce, which lets Clione read your catalog and write its signals, and the Clione WordPress plugin, which prints those signals into the pages your server sends. The key alone is enough to sync and enrich. Nothing Clione writes shows on your storefront until the plugin is installed.

Connecting BigCommerce or Shopify instead? See Connect BigCommerce or Connect Shopify.

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Before you start

• https is required. WooCommerce only accepts a REST API key over https, and Clione refuses a site served over plain http.
• Your WordPress has to answer at the root of its domain. The form takes https://shop.example.com, not https://example.com/shop: a URL with a path is refused.

Step 1 — Create a REST API key in WooCommerce

In your WordPress admin, go to WooCommerce → Settings → Advanced → REST API and click Add key.

• Description: anything you'll recognise later, for example "Clione".
• User: an administrator account.
• Permissions: Read/Write.

Click Generate API key and copy the Consumer key (starts with ck_) and the Consumer secret (starts with cs_). WooCommerce shows the secret only once.

Why Read/Write. Clione writes its signals into your products, product categories and pages through this key, and it registers the webhooks that keep products in sync. A read-only key can sync, but every publish fails.

Step 2 — Add the store in Clione

1. In the Clione dashboard, click + Add website in the left rail. This opens Add Store.

2. Platform: choose WooCommerce.

3. Details: fill in these fields, then click Next.

   • Store Name: any name that helps you recognise the store in the dashboard.
   • WordPress site URL: the home URL of your site, for example https://shop.example.com. If you leave out https://, Clione adds it.
   • Currency: the default currency for prices and reports. Clione also reads your store currency from WooCommerce itself.

   

4. Connect: paste the Consumer key and Consumer secret from Step 1, then click Create & Connect.

   You can also click Create Store without the keys and add them later in Store Settings → Credentials.

   

When you save the keys, Clione registers product webhooks in your WooCommerce store, so a product you create, update or delete there syncs on its own. Categories and pages are kept up to date when you run a sync.

Step 3 — Check the connection

Open the store and go to Store Settings → Credentials, then click Test connection. Clione makes one authenticated call to your site's REST API. If it works you see "Connection OK; WooCommerce confirmed" and the store name. If it doesn't, you see the error WooCommerce or your host returned.

The Setup assistants card on the store's Overview does not run its checks on WooCommerce. The steps it would check show as "Clione cannot check this on WooCommerce yet, so it is not counted as done." Test connection is the check that works here.

Next, run your first sync. See Sync your catalog.

Step 4 — Install the Clione WordPress plugin

The plugin, Clione Signals, is what puts Clione's work in front of crawlers and AI assistants. It prints, in the HTML your server sends on the first request:

• one JSON-LD block per page with Organization, WebSite, BreadcrumbList, the product, category or page itself, and FAQPage when it has FAQs;
• the meta title and meta description Clione wrote, unless an SEO plugin owns them (see below);
• the FAQ accordion, rendered by PHP so it works without JavaScript. A [clione_faq] shortcode is there for themes and page builders that skip WordPress's standard hooks.

Getting the plugin. The plugin is a zip you upload in Plugins → Add New → Upload Plugin. It isn't listed on WordPress.org and the dashboard has no download button yet: ask us for it at help@clione.ai, together with the Clione endpoint the plugin asks for.

Connecting it. In WordPress, open Settings → Clione FAQ and fill in:

• API key: create one in Clione under Store Settings → API Keys: Key type set to Server, the products:read scope, and no allowed domains. WordPress calls Clione from your server, not from a browser. Revoking the key in Clione cuts the site off without touching WordPress.
• Clione endpoint: the plugin ships with no address of its own. Use the one we gave you.

Save. The settings page then says whether the key verified.

Send WordPress changes to Clione is off by default. With it on, editing a page, product or category in WordPress queues the change for review in Clione, and nothing is applied until someone on your team approves it. It needs a key permission the API Keys tab doesn't offer yet, so ask us if you want it.

Page writes need the plugin. WordPress only accepts Clione's fields on a page once the plugin has registered them. Until the plugin is installed, publishing a page from Clione writes nothing to it. Products and product categories accept the fields without the plugin, but nothing shows on the storefront until the plugin prints them.

If you use Yoast, Rank Math, All in One SEO or SEOPress, the plugin leaves the title, meta description and Open Graph tags to that plugin and prints only the JSON-LD, which no SEO plugin produces in Clione's shape. You'll see a comment saying so in your page source.

Caching. When Clione writes new signals to a page, product or category, the plugin purges that one page from WP Rocket, W3 Total Cache, WP Super Cache, LiteSpeed, Cache Enabler, WP Fastest Cache, SiteGround Optimizer and Nginx Helper. It never flushes your whole site. A cache in front of WordPress (a host or CDN cache) isn't purged.

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What Clione syncs

WooCommerce	In Clione	Synced
Products	Products	Every status, with variations
Product categories	Categories	All, including empty ones
WordPress pages	Pages	Published pages only

Blog posts and product tags are not synced.

On Pro and Agency, Clione also reads your orders from the last 30 days, once a day, for the Attribution report. WooCommerce sends the whole order, including the buyer's contact details; Clione keeps only the number, date, status, currency, totals and line items, and never stores a customer's name, email, phone or address. On Starter and Growth no order is read, even though your API key would allow it. Order data is kept for 13 months from the order date, then deleted automatically. If you move to a plan without Attribution, Clione stops reading orders, and the ones it already kept are deleted on that same schedule.

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What works on WooCommerce, and what doesn't

Compared with BigCommerce and Shopify, entity by entity. For every platform and signal, see Platform capabilities.

Signal	Products	Product categories	Pages
JSON-LD, including FAQPage	✓ (plugin)	✓ (plugin)	✓ (plugin)
Meta description	✓ (plugin)	✓ (plugin)	✓ (plugin)
Meta title	✓ (plugin)	Opt-in, off by default	Opt-in, off by default
Visible FAQ accordion	✓ (plugin)	✓ (plugin)	✓ (plugin)

The meta title on categories and pages follows the same store setting as on the other platforms: Push meta_title to categories, collections, and pages, in Store Settings → General.

What WooCommerce doesn't get today:

• No llms.txt or .md documents on your domain. BigCommerce gets them on a subdomain you point at Clione, Shopify through the Clione app. WooCommerce has no equivalent.
• No canonical URL, meta keywords or Open Graph tags written by Clione. BigCommerce gets all three. (With no SEO plugin active, the WordPress plugin prints a canonical on category and tag archives; that is the plugin's own, not a Clione signal.)
• No per-language signals for markets. Only Shopify has them.
• No multi-currency JSON-LD. Only Shopify has it. Variant price ranges (lowest to highest price) do work.
• No Setup assistants checks, as described in Step 3.
• No FAQ widget check and no Schema Injector. The Schema Injector is BigCommerce's storefront script; on WooCommerce the plugin does that job, and Clione doesn't check whether it's installed.
• Nothing on the storefront without the plugin. On BigCommerce, Clione installs its storefront output through the platform's API. On WooCommerce you install the plugin yourself.

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Troubleshooting

The form says "Enter your WordPress site URL": the field is empty. "Enter a valid URL starting with https:// or http://": what you typed isn't a web address. Use the home URL of your site.

"Use the storefront root domain only": your URL has a path. Use the domain WordPress answers on, with no /shop or page path.

Test connection fails with an authentication error: the consumer key and secret don't match, or the key was revoked. Create a new key and paste both values again in Store Settings → Credentials. Leaving a field blank keeps the saved value.

Test connection shows an HTML error page: a firewall, a security plugin or a maintenance page answered instead of WooCommerce. Allow requests to /wp-json/ on your site.

Publishing a page does nothing on the storefront: the plugin isn't installed or isn't connected. See Step 4.

The title or description on the storefront isn't Clione's: an SEO plugin is active, and the Clione plugin is leaving those to it on purpose.

Questions? Email help@clione.ai.