HTML to Markdown Converter

Why convert HTML to Markdown

Markdown is far easier to edit, diff in version control, and paste into places like GitHub issues, chat apps, or note-taking tools than raw HTML markup. This converter reads HTML, including headings, links, lists, bold and italic text, and code blocks, and rewrites it as equivalent, clean Markdown syntax, so content copied from a web page or exported from a rich text editor becomes easy to work with as plain text.

How the conversion works

The tool uses Turndown, a well-established JavaScript library built specifically for this task, running entirely in your browser. Turndown walks the HTML's element tree and maps each tag to its Markdown equivalent, headings to # symbols, emphasis tags to asterisks, anchor tags to bracketed links, and preserves the semantic structure of the content rather than just stripping tags and leaving plain, unformatted text behind.

What converts cleanly

Standard content elements, headings, paragraphs, ordered and unordered lists, links, images, bold and italic emphasis, blockquotes, and both inline and fenced code blocks, all convert reliably to their well-known Markdown equivalents. Tables convert to Markdown's pipe-delimited table syntax when the HTML uses standard table markup.

Typical use cases

Writers pasting content copied from a web page into a Markdown-based blog or documentation platform use this to avoid manually retyping formatting. Developers converting an HTML email template or a scraped article into Markdown for further editing find this considerably faster than doing it by hand, especially for longer documents with a lot of formatting.

A note on complex or unusual HTML

Highly customized HTML using CSS classes for visual effects, deeply nested layout tables used for positioning rather than tabular data, or embedded scripts and iframes, has no clean Markdown equivalent and is either simplified or dropped, since Markdown intentionally supports a smaller, more constrained set of formatting than full HTML does.

Step-by-step walkthrough

Paste your HTML into the input box, or drop an .html file onto the page to load its markup automatically. Click Convert, and Turndown rewrites the structure as Markdown, which appears in the output box within moments along with a rough line count. Click Download Result to save converted.md, ready to paste into any Markdown-based tool.

Privacy and performance

Because the HTML to Markdown Converter runs as JavaScript inside your own browser tab rather than on a remote server, there's no upload step, no waiting on a network connection, and no copy of your file sitting on someone else's infrastructure afterward. That also means it keeps working exactly the same whether your file is a few bytes or several megabytes, limited only by your own device's memory rather than a server's queue or rate limit. If you ever want to double-check that nothing is being transmitted, your browser's built-in developer tools network tab will show no outgoing request for the file's contents at any point during conversion. This also means the tool keeps working offline once the page has loaded, and closing the tab afterward leaves no copy behind on any server, since one was never made in the first place. That's a meaningful difference from typical online converters, which usually require uploading your file to a remote service before you ever see a result.

Frequently Asked Questions