Walgreens Boots Alliance

The Client

Walgreens Boots Alliance is a global leader in retail and wholesale pharmacy, touching millions of lives every day through dispensing and distributing medicines, its convenient retail locations, digital platforms, and health and beauty products. The company has more than 100 years of trusted healthcare heritage and innovation in community pharmacy and pharmaceutical wholesaling. The company’s portfolio of retail and business brands includes Walgreens, Duane Reade, Boots and Alliance Healthcare.

The Situation

Walgreens Boots Alliance wanted to reimagine WBA.com from a corporate website to a future-proofed experience representative of a brand innovator. With a wide-ranging audience, including non-profits, NGOs, government bodies, partners and potential/current employees, its mission was to establish proof of WBA’s genuine commitment to corporate social responsibility. The expectation was to be honest and transparent with corporate information — including facts, actions and progress — alongside all corporate responsibility claims.

The Challenge

WBA’s old site suffered from poor discoverability and poor performance, in addition to failing to meet accessibility guidelines. With the release of an annual corporate social responsibility report on the horizon, the development team had a lot to accomplish in just four two-week sprints to address these areas and replatform on Drupal 8.

The Solution

Partner VMLY&R set out to leverage KIT, an open source distribution created by its Drupal practice, to get the site ready for content entry as soon as possible. The Acquia Cloud Platform enabled the team to provide continuous delivery of updates, through multiple environments, for the project's duration. 

With a technical team of two full-time developers, the teams created a minimally styled authorable environment by the end of the first two-week sprint, which allowed the teams to author content early in the project timeline and kept several workstreams progressing in parallel.

The Results

The teams met their primary objective, launching the site a few days before the corporate social responsibility report was released; in fact, WBA and VMLY&R content teams were able to author a full six weeks before launch. This extended content entry period allowed them to manually migrate the "lift and shift" content and add new schema and metadata information throughout the site. The emphasis on discoverability netted a 144% increase in organic traffic and overall site traffic saw an increase of 272%. 

Since the launch, several new features have been pushed, delivering on the new platform's necessity to be a foundation for the future. Most notably, the site is now multilingual, allowing WBA to extend their new global brand presence into China.