Your conversion rate dropped after the website redesign. That is almost never people rejecting the new look. It is one or two specific things that changed underneath the design, and both are usually findable within a week if you know where to check. The first bucket is something a visitor can no longer find or do on the new site. The second is something the team can no longer measure correctly.
One documented case removed roughly 15 percent of a site's pages during a redesign and watched organic traffic fall by close to half. A hit wildly out of proportion to the size of the change. That is the pattern worth sitting with. A redesign gets judged in a review meeting on how clean it looks, not on whether the path a paying visitor takes still works the way it used to.
Start with tracking. It is the fastest thing to rule out and the easiest for a team to skip. Analytics and conversion goals rarely survive a rebuild untouched. A tag fires on the old button and not the new one. A thank you page URL changes and the goal quietly stops counting. A form ID gets regenerated and the event never sends. Some of the drop you are looking at is not a real change in visitor behaviour, it is a measurement gap, and it is worth ruling out before anyone touches a single pixel of the design.
If tracking checks out clean, look at what got buried. Pricing. A phone number. The one call to action that used to sit above the fold, now gone or three clicks deeper because the new layout wanted to look calmer. The redesign usually looks better in the room. It removed friction the team wanted gone, and along with it, the piece of information a buyer still needed before saying yes.
The next problem is scope. Change the layout, the copy, the tracking and the page structure in a single release and you lose the ability to tell which one cost you the conversions. A studio doing this properly stages the rollout, or at minimum keeps a change log tied to the launch date, so a drop can be traced to a cause instead of a guess made a month later.
The most preventable cause on this list is shipping the pages that make money untested. Checkout and form friction alone accounts for a meaningful share of abandoned orders across the industry, and the average checkout still carries more fields than it needs. Skipping usability testing on the exact flow that makes money is choosing not to find these problems before launch. You find them afterward instead, at the client's expense.
The conversion number itself will not tell you which of these happened. It only tells you that something did. Compare the new page against the old page's actual recorded behaviour on the same step, not against how the new one performs in the abstract. Watch a handful of session recordings on the exact point where the funnel now leaks. Do not start with the whole site.
This is the part of the job that happens before launch, not after the number falls: testing the pages that make money against the old baseline while there is still time to fix what breaks. If your last redesign shipped without that step, that is the thing to change before the next one. Not the colour palette.