Managing Consistency Across Seven Locales: Notes From Building a Large VPN Knowledge Base

Localization becomes complex not because of language — but because of consistency.

When you maintain the same technical article across seven locales, even a tiny change in the source language means updating:
• titles
• meta descriptions
• internal links
• screenshots
• structured data
• hreflang relations

To keep everything synchronized, I use a layered approach:

1️⃣ English (EN-GB) as the source of truth

No change is made in another language unless it exists in EN-GB first.

2️⃣ A mirrored folder structure across all locales

This removes 90% of routing mistakes.

3️⃣ A slug-matching workflow

If an article exists in EN-GB, it must exist in all six additional locales.

Here’s an example article from the EN-GB branch:

👉 https://dloran1.github.io/en-gb/blog/vpn-dedicated-ip-uk.html

4️⃣ Git version control as the safety net

Every change is tracked.
Every update is documented.
Rollback is one click.

This predictable structure is what keeps the project scalable as it grows.

I’ll be writing more about automation — especially tools that compare slugs, map metadata and detect drift between locales.