A few months ago I took on the role as Marketing Director for a small/midsize Managed IT/Compliance/Network Cabling firm. 12 employees and growth year over year but it's all been word of mouth. Zero marketing and zero sales strategies besides the owner doing sales (primarily from referrals). He wanted to change and has been doing a lot of work to create new marketing and sales roles.
I have experience in both marketing and sales as well as website development, but nothing more than some squarespace and wordpress development with basic SEO. Our current website is being run by HIBU and has been for almost 10 years. The performance is terrible, like a 2k views a year terrible and nearly zero conversion. They're also charging him 1k for SEO/website but there's been no website updates and their SEO is bare bones basic.
HERE'S MY CONCERN: Despite all that, the site does rank 1 or 2 with a few favorable keywords. The site desperately needs a facelift and refocus on our my current offerings. It currently focuses on business phone solutions which used to be our best stream but compliance as surpassed it despite getting next to no love on the current site. I've been reading this it's disastrous for SEO to totally rehaul websites and site structure. I think we can build and maintain a better site ourselves as well as redesign it to focus more on our current preferred service selection but I'm also getting cold feet about such major changes tanking our current positioning. Granted, what's the point of having good positioning at the moment when it's not converting.
Edit: I will note that we are only interested in ranking locally an an area of about 100,000.
If it doesnt convert I wouldn’t worry about it. Those keyphrases will probably be easy to retain. Build your new site on a staging site. 301 redirects all setup before you move it so the urls all match up.
Have you got GMB all setup as well and have you done all your local citations?
Just explain it could possibly be a short term dip but the long term advantages will far outweigh that and mention how much money you will also be saving him as well.
Whenever I have migrated a site from another platform it has always got better very quickly.
What are or have you built your WordPress site on? Did you use a theme or a builder?