I have an old website of which some articles are in the first position on google, the only thing is that they are poorly written and are ugly to look at. Can I safely delete the text and rewrite it from scratch to make it better or could this cause problems and cause me to drop the rankings? For the moment I am creating new articles to which I refer them from the old ones, but I don't know what is better.
And still your articles are coming on first position mean competition is very low otherwise nowadays Google and other search engines care about all things like grammer, readablility score etc. and rank them accordingly. If you will change them with fresh unique then i think this will not impact ranking more and search engines prefer always update so i think you will get some additional good response from search engine due to unique and eye-catchy contents. Contents always good so, you can place new contents at top and just make a heading like "Previous Written Contents" or add them in quote and leave them on same page (After fresh contents).
You can edit them but DON'T DELETE the url/page as it has age and hopefully backlinks to it. When it gets recrawled it could be reranked. I'd keep the word count, keyword density similar when rewritting it.
It is generally safe to delete poorly written content from your website and rewrite it from scratch to make it better. However, before you do so, you should consider a few things to minimize any negative impact on your search engine rankings. Firstly, make sure you have a clear understanding of the keywords and phrases that the content is ranking for. This will help you to rewrite the content in a way that still targets those keywords and maintains the relevance of the page. Secondly, consider implementing 301 redirects from the old URLs to the new ones. This will ensure that any links pointing to the old content will still direct users to the updated version, and will help to preserve any existing search engine rankings. Finally, keep in mind that any changes to your website can have an impact on your search engine rankings, either positive or negative. It is important to monitor your traffic and rankings closely after making any significant changes to your site, and to be prepared to make adjustments if necessary. In summary, it is generally safe to delete and rewrite poorly written content on your website, but it's important to take precautions to minimize any negative impact on your search engine rankings.