How to keep a translated website in sync

Translating a website is a project; keeping it translated is a habit. Every time you change a price, an opening hour or a paragraph in your main language, the other languages are one edit behind, and nobody tells you. The fix is a small routine: decide which changes must reach every language the same day, make them in one sitting, and let your tools flag what you missed. Here is the routine I'd follow, and how FolioPress helps with it.

How translations drift

Nobody decides to let the German page fall behind. It happens one small edit at a time:

You fix a typo in English. Harmless; the translations never had the typo.
You change a price or a date in English. Now the French page is wrong, and wrong in a way that costs you: a customer who reads €45 and is charged €49 has a reason to be annoyed.
You add a paragraph about a new service. The Spanish page doesn't mention it, so Spanish visitors never learn you offer it.
You rewrite the page title for search. The other languages keep the old title, and their search snippets stop matching the page.

After a year of this, the translations describe a slightly different business. Visitors who switch languages notice. Search engines don't mind, but your customers do.

Sort your edits into three kinds

The trick is not to treat every edit the same. Before you save, ask which kind it is:

Facts. Prices, dates, times, addresses, phone numbers, product names, legal text. These must be the same in every language, and they should change in every language in the same sitting. A wrong price in one language is worse than a missing paragraph.

Meaning. A new section, a removed offer, a changed promise. These should reach every language soon, but they can wait a day for a proper translation or a review by someone who speaks the language.

Wording. A typo, a better sentence, a reordered paragraph that says the same thing. These often don't need to travel at all. The translation was written from the meaning, not the exact words, and it may already read better than a fresh one would.

Most edits are wording. The ones that hurt are facts, because they are short and easy to forget.

A routine that works

Keep facts out of prose where you can. "Open Tuesday to Sunday, 12:00 to 22:00" in a short line is easy to find in every language; the same fact buried in a paragraph is easy to miss.
Edit the main language first, always. If you fix something directly in the Italian page, the next time someone retranslates from English, your fix is gone.
Do the other languages in the same sitting for facts. Open each language, change the number, save. It takes minutes when you do it right away and an afternoon when you do it in March for everything since October.
Batch the meaning changes. Once a week or once a month, go through the pages you changed and bring the translations up to date: a fresh machine draft for new sections, then a read-through.
Leave wording changes alone unless they change what the page says.
Check the parts outside the page body. Titles, search descriptions, image texts and menu labels are translated too, and they're the parts people forget.

If you work with a translator, the same sorting saves money: send them only the meaning changes, in batches, with the old and new versions side by side. If you pay by the word, every changed page is paid for again, so sending only what changed matters.

How FolioPress flags pages that may be out of sync

In FolioPress every page and post is written in your primary language first, with a tab for each other language. Since October 2026, the editor watches the title, the content and the search description of each language while you edit:

If you change one of them in the primary language and haven't touched the same field in another language since, that language's tab gets a dot ("ES•").
A language that's empty where the primary one isn't gets the dot too.
When you save with any dot showing, FolioPress asks first and lists each language and field that "might be out of sync". You choose Sync them, Save anyway or Go back.

Sync them asks the AI to translate the primary-language version of those fields again, one request per language, and saves. It counts against your site's monthly AI allowance like any other Translate. Save anyway saves what you have, which is the right choice for a wording fix. Go back returns you to the editor so you can update the other tabs by hand.

Two things to know, so the dot doesn't give you false confidence:

It watches edits, not texts. FolioPress doesn't compare the English and German texts to decide whether they mean the same thing. It notices that you changed the English during this visit to the editor and didn't change the German after it. If you saved anyway last week, the page opens without a dot today. That's what the routine above is for.
Sync replaces the whole field. If you hand-polished the German page, Sync them replaces that field with a fresh AI draft of the current English. For a small fact change in a long page you've polished, Go back and edit the number by hand instead.

The page addresses (slugs) aren't watched: a translated page keeps its own address when you edit the primary one, so links to it don't break.

What a translation can wait for, and what it can't

A page that hasn't been translated yet is not a problem in FolioPress: visitors to that language simply get the primary-language page, not a broken link. A page that was translated and is now wrong is the real problem, because it looks finished.

So if you're short on time, it's better to have three languages that are right than six that are half right. You can remove a language from a page by emptying its tab, and add it back when it's up to date.

A checklist for every edit

Is this a fact, a meaning change or wording?
Facts: changed in every language, today.
Meaning: on the list for this week's batch.
Wording: leave the translations alone unless the meaning moved.
Title and search description: still match the page in every language?
In FolioPress: any dots on the language tabs? Sync, save anyway, or go back, on purpose.

If you want to see how translations, language tabs and translated addresses fit together, the quick start walks through it, and AI translation explains how the drafts work. The features page has the rest, and pricing shows what each plan includes.