How Boots is ditching copy and paste with Amplience CMS
Five pages. The same content. Copied and pasted five times. That was everyday life for the Boots.com content team, until Project Condor started moving the Boots website to Amplience CMS.
Now content is created once and placed on as many pages as it needs. Images that used to need a stack of mobile crops just work.
Key takeaways
Boots, the UK health and beauty retailer, is moving Boots.com from a legacy CMS to Amplience CMS with both running side by side so the site keeps trading.
In Amplience CMS, content is created once and reused across many pages, and images no longer need separate mobile crops.
The Health Hub went first because it’s non-transactional, and the team reviewed more than 500 of its pages to remove outdated content before moving them.
A small group of super users tested Amplience CMS before the rest of the content team started using it, then wrote the documentation and trained everyone else.
New content team members at Boots, including juniors new to the industry, are up to speed in Amplience CMS in under three weeks.
Why updating the Boots website took so long in its old CMS
In the old CMS, content lived on individual pages. If the same piece of advice needed to appear in five places, someone built it five times.
Images were just as manual. Each one needed several separate crops to display properly on mobile, and with that many manual steps, mistakes crept in. Sometimes content didn’t show up correctly on the site.
Boots also wanted a faster website, better SEO and GEO and a consistent look across every page. And the change had to happen without taking the site offline. With many legacy systems to move away from, the team decided to run the old CMS and Amplience CMS side by side while the site kept trading.
How Boots is migrating Boots.com to a headless content operations platform
Reusable content, built on the Boots design system
Ask Michelle for her favorite thing about Amplience CMS and she doesn’t hesitate.
“Definitely the reusable content. That is a game changer for us.”
Instead of five copies of the same content, there’s now one, placed wherever it’s needed. Images are uploaded once and display correctly on mobile.
Every component is custom, built on Boots’ own design system by product owners, architects, UX designers and developers working together. It took plenty of testing to get right, and now pages look and behave consistently across the site.
The team had to think differently too. Instead of building for one page, they now build content so it can be used again.
Starting the migration with the Boots Health Hub
Boots chose the Health Hub as the first section to migrate. It links to products and services, but customers don’t buy directly from it, so if anything went wrong, sales wouldn’t be affected. Category pages, where customers actually shop, could move once the team had proved the process.
Before anything moved, the Health Hub team reviewed more than 500 pages and removed outdated content. Only the most useful content made the trip.
How Boots trained its content team on Amplience CMS
About a month before the rest of the content team started using Amplience CMS, a small group of super users, Michelle included, got early access. They tested every component against Boots’ processes and wrote the documentation everyone else would follow. Now they’re the in-house experts who train new starters.
New starters, including juniors who are new to the industry, learn by building a real page from a brief in a safe training environment, before they touch the live site.
Role-based permissions in Amplience CMS keep quality high without slowing anyone down. The people who build, review and publish content each have their own role, with checks in place before anything goes live.
What’s changed for Boots with Amplience CMS so far
About halfway through the migration, the content team already works differently.
| Before Amplience CMS | With Amplience CMS |
|---|---|
| The same content copied and pasted onto every page | Content created once and reused across many pages |
| Several separate mobile crops for every image | Images uploaded once and displayed correctly on mobile |
Getting new people productive is quick, too. New team members, some brand new to the industry, are up to speed in Amplience CMS in under three weeks.
What’s next for the Boots.com migration
As of September 2026, the Health Hub is live, information pages are moving now, and the rest of the site follows in 2027. Then the whole team moves into Amplience CMS as its main CMS, and the focus turns to getting pages from brief to live faster.
Watch Boots at Amplify: Agentic Commerce Live
In the full session from the Power User stage, Michelle explains how Boots trained a team of super users, and why the Health Hub was the right place to start.
Build it once. Use it on every page.
Moving a big retail site doesn’t have to happen all at once. Start with one section, train your super users, and let reusable content do the heavy lifting. We’ll help you plan your first move.