Website maintenance in Uzbekistan: what it covers and costs

The site is live — now what

Many business owners in Tashkent treat a website as a one-off purchase: pay, get the link, move on. Half a year later the contact form no longer sends emails, the security certificate has expired, and the catalogue still lists products that left the warehouse long ago. Website maintenance exists so that you find these problems before your customers do.

Development answers the question of how a site is built and how it looks. Maintenance answers a different one: who makes sure it keeps working and keeps producing enquiries. The two are separate jobs, but it is easier when the team that built the site also looks after it, because they already know its code and logic.

What website maintenance includes

The scope depends on the project. A one-page site built on a constructor needs less attention than an online store with a catalogue, customer accounts and card payments. Still, the usual baseline looks like this:

• updates for the CMS, plugins, libraries and server environment;
• backups, plus a check that the site can really be restored from them;
• protection against hacking and spam, access control, SSL and domain renewals;
• monitoring of uptime and load speed, especially on mobile internet;
• content edits: prices, promotions, banners, new pages and sections;
• testing of forms and integrations such as a CRM, a Telegram bot, Click and Payme;
• basic analytics and SEO hygiene: tracking codes, broken links, indexing.

What is specific to the Uzbek market

Most visitors arrive on phones, coming from Instagram, Telegram, search, OLX listings or marketplaces like Uzum. Someone taps a link in a story, the page loads slowly or the order button does nothing, and you have lost an enquiry you already paid to attract through ads. That is why mobile speed and working forms should be checked on a schedule, not after complaints.

Language is the second point. If your site has Russian and Uzbek versions, they need to be updated together. Otherwise one version shows the new price in sum while the other shows the old one, and that quickly becomes an argument with a buyer.

Payments are the third. Click, Payme and other providers change their requirements from time to time, so after any site update it is worth running a test order. Also find out in whose name the domain and hosting are registered. Quite often they belong to a freelancer who stopped replying long ago.

What shapes the price

There is no single price, and that is normal. The cost in sum depends on the size and complexity of the site, the technology (a standard CMS or custom code), the number of integrations, how fast you expect a response to an outage, and how many edits you need each month. Hosting, domain and paid licences are usually billed separately, so ask about them at the start.

The billing model matters too. A fixed monthly fee suits sites with regular edits and gives you predictable costs. Pay-per-task works better for sites that rarely change. Be careful with contracts that simply say "maintenance" without a list of tasks: later, every small request turns out to be "outside the package".

How to choose a contractor and what to put in writing

The Tashkent market is uneven: freelancers, small studios and full-service agencies all offer this. The difference is usually discipline rather than price: are tasks tracked, is there a report, and who answers when the site goes down on a Friday evening. Before a long contract, agree on a trial period with clear criteria. The agreement should state:

• the exact list of recurring work and what is billed separately;
• response times for outages and for ordinary edits;
• who owns the access credentials, domain, hosting and source code;
• the format and frequency of reports: uptime, speed, completed tasks;
• how requests are submitted, through one tracker or chat rather than scattered messages;
• the terms for handing the project to another team if you change contractors.

Common mistakes

The most frequent one is keeping every login with a single person and having no backups. Next comes saving money on updates: the site works, so nobody touches it until it gets hacked. The third is maintenance without analytics. If you cannot see how many leads arrive and from where, you cannot tell whether the site pays off or the budget just goes to keeping it alive.

So agree on metrics in advance: number of enquiries from the site, load speed, and the share of time the site is available. For an online store, add the share of completed payments.

Where to start

Begin with a short audit: what the site is built on, where it is hosted, who holds access, and what is already broken. After that it becomes clear whether you need a full monthly plan or just a one-time setup and occasional edits.

The markdev team builds websites turnkey and also takes them on for ongoing support, including projects we did not build ourselves. If you want to discuss your site and work out which format fits, leave a request. We will look at the task and tell you plainly what is actually needed.