HTML to Markdown Converter

What is an HTML to Markdown Converter?

An HTML to Markdown converter takes HTML markup and transforms it into clean, readable Markdown syntax. This tool is essential for developers who need to migrate content from CMS platforms (WordPress, Drupal), email templates, or rich-text editors into Markdown-based workflows including GitHub, Obsidian, Notion, GitBook, and static site generators like Jekyll, Hugo, and Next.js.

Unlike AI-powered converters that hallucinate or drop content, this tool uses the battle-tested Turndown.js library for deterministic, 100% accurate conversion every time. Your HTML is never sent to any server — everything runs in your browser.

Why This Beats AI

Large language models (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini) have critical failures when converting HTML to Markdown:

1. Hallucinated content — AI models frequently invent text, drop paragraphs, or mis-nest list items during conversion. A 10-paragraph article might come back with 8 or 12 paragraphs containing fabricated content.
2. Broken tables — HTML tables with colspan, rowspan, or complex headers are consistently mangled by AI. Alignment, cell merging, and header associations are often lost.
3. Code block corruption — <pre><code> blocks lose indentation, language annotations, or have HTML entities incorrectly decoded. AI models routinely output broken code fences.
4. Nested list failure — Deeply nested unordered/ordered lists are frequently flattened or re-ordered incorrectly by LLMs, losing the document structure.
5. Link and image loss — AI models drop or mangle href and src attributes, creating dead links or wrong image references.
6. Inconsistent output — Run the same HTML through an AI twice and you get different output. This tool produces identical results every time (deterministic).

This tool uses deterministic parsing with zero AI involvement. Every tag is correctly converted, every attribute preserved, and every structure maintained.

Features

• Heading style — Choose ATX (# H1) or Setext (H1\n====) format
• Bullet marker — Select -, *, or + for unordered lists
• Code block style — Fenced (triple backticks) or indented (4 spaces) code blocks
• Link style — Inlined [text](url) or referenced [text][ref] format
• Horizontal rule — Choose ---, ***, or ___ for HR
• Auto-convert — Real-time conversion as you type or paste
• HTML escape — Preserve HTML entities within content blocks
• Copy Markdown — One-click copy of clean Markdown output
• Download .md — Save the result as a Markdown file
• Real-time stats — Character, word, and line counts for both input and output
• Sample data — Pre-loaded HTML examples to test the converter instantly
• 100% client-side — Zero upload, zero server, zero API keys needed

Common Use Cases

• CMS to Markdown migration: Export content from WordPress/Wix/Squarespace and convert to Markdown for static site generators
• Email to documentation: Convert HTML email templates into clean Markdown for internal wikis and knowledge bases
• Rich text to GitHub: Paste HTML from Google Docs or Notion and get GitHub-ready Markdown for READMEs and issues
• Web scraping: Extract HTML content from scraped pages and convert to readable Markdown for analysis
• Content republishing: Convert HTML blog posts to Markdown for cross-posting on Dev.to, Medium, or Hashnode
• AI prompt cleanup: AI-generated HTML output often contains messy inline styles and div soup — convert to clean Markdown with one click

How HTML to Markdown Conversion Works

The converter parses your HTML into a DOM tree using the browser's built-in parser. It then walks the tree node by node, applying rules that map each HTML element to its Markdown equivalent. <h1> becomes # (ATX) or underlining (Setext). <strong> becomes **bold**. <a> becomes [text](url). <table> becomes pipe-delimited rows. <pre><code> becomes fenced code blocks with language annotation.

Supported elements include: headings (h1–h6), paragraphs, bold/strong, italic/em, strikethrough, inline code, links, images, unordered lists (ul/li), ordered lists (ol/li), nested lists, tables (with thead, tbody, th, td), blockquotes, horizontal rules, code blocks (pre > code), line breaks, and definition lists.

Output Options Explained

Frequently Asked Questions

Is this HTML to Markdown converter free?

Yes, completely free. No signup, no usage limits, no hidden paid features. Convert as much HTML as you need, as often as you want. Every feature including copy and download is available to everyone.

Is my HTML content sent to a server?

No. Everything runs entirely in your browser using the Turndown.js library. Your HTML never leaves your device. You can verify this by opening your browser's DevTools Network tab — zero outbound requests during conversion.

Does it handle complex HTML tables?

Yes. Tables with headers, cell merging is not directly representable in standard Markdown, so merged cells are expanded. The converter handles thead, tbody, th, td, rowspan, and colspan attributes correctly, producing clean pipe-table Markdown.

Does it preserve code block language annotations?

Yes. <pre><code class="language-javascript"> becomes ```javascript. The language class is extracted from the code element's class attribute for proper syntax highlighting in the Markdown output.

Can I convert Markdown back to HTML?

This tool is designed for HTML to Markdown conversion. For the reverse (Markdown to HTML), check out our Markdown Editor & Preview tool which provides live Markdown-to-HTML rendering with GitHub Flavored Markdown support.

What HTML elements are supported?

The converter supports all common block-level and inline elements: h1-h6, p, strong/em/u/s, a, img, ul/ol/li, table (thead/tbody/th/td), blockquote, pre/code, hr, br, div, span, dl/dt/dd, and more. Unsupported elements are gracefully handled by extracting their text content.

Does it work on mobile?

Yes. On smaller screens, the HTML input and Markdown output panels stack vertically for easy editing. All buttons have proper touch targets, and the controls adapt to fit any screen size.

What is Turndown.js?

Turndown.js is an open-source JavaScript library that converts HTML to Markdown. It is the most widely used and rigorously tested HTML-to-Markdown converter in the JavaScript ecosystem, trusted by thousands of projects. The library runs entirely in the browser with zero dependencies.