WordPress.com website migration to Seravo's environment

In this guide, we'll walk you through on how to transfer your WordPress.com site to Seravo hosting. Before starting the site migration make sure you have access to your Seravo WordPress site.

Important! WordPress.com site migration does not import over the theme used on the site.

Why migrate to using Seravo environment?

WordPress.com is a very barebones package and even the most expensive plan does not give you the same freedom offered by Seravo's environment. For example, even the Premium option at WordPress.com does not include full plugin support. Seravo environment however has no limits regarding plugins or themes, whereas WordPress.com offers full support only in their Business package. Sites running on WordPress.com all have a WordPress.com identifier on them unless you're using the Business package, whereas on Seravo the seravo.com identifier is automatically removed upon publishing the site.

Export from WordPress.com

WordPress.com site migration to Seravo requires an XML-file from WordPress.com. You can obtain the XML-file from the control panel, and navigate to the options on the left side of the control panel. From there you can find the export link.

XML-file export.

Under the export option, you can find an export all option. When you select export all, WordPress.com will generate a .zip file for you to download, which includes the XML-file of your site. After the file is downloaded you can unpack the contents of the .zip file into your Downloads folder for example, from which it will be fetched at a later step.

Import to Seravo

Starting the import tool under the Seravo WordPress environment.

Once you're logged in to the Seravo WordPress environment with the admin account of your site, you can find Tools under the left-hand side panel in the dashboard. Under Tools, there is an import option. The import menu that opens up contains several import options, including WordPress.

Importing the XML-file.

On the next page you can see a "Browse..." button, which is used to fetch the XML-file imported earlier from your old WordPress.com site. If you followed the earlier steps in this guide, you should be able to find the XML-file in your Downloads folder. On the next page, you're asked to select the author of the articles, which defaults to the same author as on the old WordPress.com site. You can also create a new user during this step of the import or alternatively move over the articles to an existing user. Once you're pleased with the settings, you can move on and the import will be complete.

Redirection

You can set up a redirection on your old WordPress.com site to point to your new site at Seravo.com. Please note that the redirections at WordPress.com cost 13€ annually. Redirection is configured under the settings of your WordPress.com site, under the site address, where you can see a "or redirect to this page". Once you click on the redirect link, you can find a line where you can add the new address where the WordPress.com will start redirecting the users of your old site.