Magento 2 is a hierarchy that allows you to create store views, stores, and websites to manage them from one admin panel and provide your customers with high-quality products of different kinds.

What is the store view in Magento 2?

In Magento 2 you can create a website with multiple stores different in design, purpose, products, etc. Store Views correspondingly are the variations of the same store in different languages.

Every Magento 2 store initially has a default store view

So, you create other store views in order to support different languages in your store to allow customers from different countries to navigate your Magento 2 store in their preferred language. 

Magento 2 Store Views

Create New Store View in Magento 2

1. Go to Stores > Settings > All stores and press the Create Store View button.

Magento 2 all store views

2. Fill in the Store View Information.

  • Choose the Store the newly created store view will be assigned to.
  • Give the Magento store view a Name and a Code. Note: it is important that you set store codes since as good SEO-practice you need to add store codes to URLs.
  • Enable or disable the store view.
  • Set the Sort Order of the store view. It defines the store view position in a list of  Magento store views.

3. Don't forget to press the Save Store View button after you've entered all the information.

Magento 2 new store view information

Once you've created a store view you will be notified about its successful creation and see it appear on the list of current Magento store views.

Magento 2 new store view

Then you need to set the language for each store view.

4. Go to Admin Panel > Stores > Configuration and switch to the store view you want to set the language for.

Magento 2 General Configurations

5. In the General > Locale Options section set the Locale (language) for the store view.

Magento 2 Locale Options

6. Do the Magento reindex, run the CLI command:

php bin/magento indexer:reindex

Once you create new store views there will appear the store switcher on the storefront to let your customers manually choose the store view they want to navigate to. You can also use the Magento 2 Language Switcher that will automatically direct your Magento 2 store customers to the store view in their local language based on geolocation or browser language.

Magento 2 store view on the storefront

Here you can watch a short video to see how to create the store view in Magento 2:

New Store View Creation is just one of the series of articles about How to Create Multi-Language Website in Magento 2? which include information about the language packs installation, useful multi-language store extensions, product&category, CMS pages&blocks, email templates, and other translations in Magento 2 website. You should definitely get acquainted with them in order to know how to manage a multilanguage store.