looking for best practices handling repeating content (e.g. navigation)

Hi,

after coding a long time with wordpress I came back to some static sites with webstorm. I am looking for best practices how to handle repeating content like e.g. the navigation section. At the moment when I change the navbar of one of my html-page I have to manually change them all on the other pages.

I looked into templates, but they are not updated in the page, when I change the definition of the template.

I am sure, that I overlook something... do I?

Thanks,
Heiko