The difference between website, store and store view – and how to create a new store view.
Magento organizes multiple shop variants across three hierarchical levels, managed under Stores > Settings > All Stores:
- Website: the top level, usually its own domain or a completely separate customer base/catalog. Customer accounts are shared across websites by default, but can be isolated per website.
- Store: a product line or brand within a website, with its own root category tree – two stores of the same website can have completely different category structures.
- Store View: the concrete, visitor-facing variant, usually per language – e.g. "Deutsch" and "English" within the same store, with an identical product catalog but translated content.
When do I need more than one level?
For pure multi-language setups (one catalog, multiple languages, as on this project), ONE website and ONE store with multiple store views is usually enough. Multiple websites only make sense for genuinely separate business models (e.g. a B2C and a B2B shop with different domains and customer bases), multiple stores for different assortments under the same domain (e.g. two brands with their own category tree).
Creating a new store view
Use Create Store View to create a new one: assign it to a store, give it a Name (visible in the backend dropdown) and a Code (technical identifier, used internally for store-switch URLs and CLI commands, should be short and free of special characters), set Status to "Enabled". Then, under Stores > Configuration, use the scope dropdown in the top left to select the new store view and set store-specific values such as language or base currency – without this step, the new store view technically exists but is content-identical to the original.
Root category and default store view per store
When editing a Store (not a Store View!) under Stores > Settings > All Stores – click the store row itself, not one of its store views – you'll find two key fields: Root Category defines which node in the category tree serves as the navigation root for all store views belonging to that store (the main menu and category pages only show subcategories of that root category). Default Store View determines which store view loads when a visitor opens the store's base URL without explicitly choosing a language. Practical tip: give each store its own root category, even if the product catalog stays identical – otherwise you won't be able to structure category pages per store later on.
Sort order in the store switcher
Alongside Name, Code and Status, the store view edit form also has a Sort Order field. It controls the order in which store views appear in the admin's scope dropdown and in the storefront's store/language switcher – lower values are shown first. Without an explicit sort order, new store views typically end up at the end of the list, which quickly gets confusing as the number of languages grows.
Disabling a store view instead of deleting it
A store view can be permanently removed via the delete action, but that irreversibly wipes all associated URL rewrites and store-specific content. Practical tip: set Status to "Disabled" in the edit form instead, when a language should be temporarily or permanently taken offline – the store view then survives as a data container and can be reactivated later. Every status change requires a full cache flush and reindex, since disabled store views must disappear from places like the sitemap and the store switcher.