A project is a folder for one brand. It holds everything you build for that brand: pages, stores, landing pages, bundles and cart drawers. More importantly, it also holds the context Atlas writes from: your customer research, your saved personas and the colour palette new pages open on. That is the part that makes projects worth understanding rather than just tolerating.
In this article:
What a project holds
Two kinds of thing.
Content, shown as tabs on your dashboard when you pick the project in the project dropdown above the table:
Tab | What it holds |
| Everything in the tabs below, in one list |
| Full stores, meaning a home page and product pages built together |
| AI-generated product pages and page variations |
| Advertorials and listicles |
| Bundle offers |
| Cart drawers |
Context, in Project settings, which opens from the gear next to the project in the dropdown:
Customer research documents, describing who you sell to
A choice of how closely Atlas should follow that research
Saved personas and their angles
A colour palette that new pages in the project open on
Why the context matters
Every build flow in Atlas asks you to pick a project on its first step. That is not filing for its own sake. The project is where Atlas gets its instructions.
When you generate a page inside a project, Atlas writes from that project's research, opens new pages on its colour palette where their design offers one, and offers its saved personas wherever the build lets you choose a persona. A project is everything you build for one brand, and Atlas reuses its research, voice and styling.
The practical effect is consistency. Your fifth page sounds like your first, because both were written from the same brief. Without projects, every page would start from nothing and drift.
💡 Spend ten minutes filling in project settings before you build your second page. It is the highest-return ten minutes in the product, and everything you build afterwards inherits it.
When to use one project and when to use several
One project per brand. If you run one store selling one brand, one project is right, even with dozens of products. They share an audience and a voice.
Separate projects when the audience or the voice genuinely differs. A store selling both technical gear to professionals and gift sets to their partners is two audiences, and copy written for one will underperform for the other.
Separate projects for genuinely separate businesses, even on the same Shopify store.
Do not create a project per product. Products inside one brand share the context, and you will hit the 25-project limit quickly for no benefit.
Limits
Limit | Value |
Projects per store | 25 |
Items per project | 25 |
An item is any page, store, landing page, bundle or cart drawer assigned to the project. When a project is full, moving one item into it shows Projects can have a maximum of 25 items, and moving several shows Project full next to the project. A bulk move that will not fit shows how much room is left.
Neither limit changes with your plan.
What a project does not do
A project is not a store. Projects exist only inside Atlas. Nothing about a project is visible to your customers, and creating one does not create anything in Shopify.
A project does not own your published pages. Once a page is published into your theme, the theme has it. Moving the page between projects, or deleting the project entirely, does not touch what your customers see.
Deleting a project does not delete its contents. Everything inside becomes unassigned and stays in your store. Only the project itself and its settings are removed: its research, saved personas and palette. See Creating and managing projects.