Does this tool preserve HTML formatting like bold, italic, and headings?

Yes — standard inline and block-level formatting converts to its Markdown equivalent: ` ` and ` ` become **bold** (double asterisks), ` ` and ` ` become *italic* (single asterisks), ` ` through ` ` become the matching number of hash marks, ` `/` ` become dash-prefixed or numbered lists, ` ` becomes a `>`-prefixed quote, and ` `/` ` become inline code spans or fenced code blocks. This covers the vast majority of formatting found in real-world HTML content, from CMS exports to copy-pasted rich text.

Developer

HTML to Markdown

Paste HTML and convert it to clean Markdown instantly, with options to keep or remove images, links, and tables. Preview the rendered result, then copy or download the .md file.

Try:

Keep images

Keep links

Keep tables

HTML

How To Use

1.Paste your HTML source into the input box — a snippet, a full page body, or content copied from a rich text editor.
2.Toggle Keep Images, Keep Links, and Keep Tables to control whether each of those elements is converted or stripped out entirely.
3.The Markdown output updates live as you type or change any option, with no button to click.
4.Switch to the Preview tab to see how the generated Markdown would actually render, as a sanity check before using it elsewhere.
5.Copy the Markdown to your clipboard, or download it as a .md file.

Examples

Formatted article

Headings, links, a list, a table, and an image — the default example.

Strip images and links

The same kind of content, converted with images and links removed.

About HTML to Markdown

Why Convert HTML to Markdown

HTML and Markdown solve similar problems in very different ways — HTML is a verbose, tag-based markup language built for browsers to render, while Markdown is a lightweight, readable plain-text format built for humans to write and read directly. Converting from HTML to Markdown is a common step whenever content needs to move from an HTML-native context (a web page, a CMS export, a rich-text editor's output) into a Markdown-native one (a static site generator, a GitHub README, a documentation platform, a note-taking app) — direct copy-pasting of rendered text loses all formatting, so a proper structural conversion like this one is needed to preserve headings, links, lists, and other formatting intact.

How This Tool Converts HTML

This tool uses turndown, a widely-used JavaScript library that parses your HTML using the browser's native, standards-compliant HTML parser, then walks the resulting document tree node by node, applying a specific conversion rule for each element type it encounters — headings become hash-prefixed lines, paragraphs become plain text blocks separated by blank lines, emphasis and strong elements become Markdown's asterisk syntax, and so on. This tool layers a few custom rules on top of turndown's defaults specifically to support the Keep Images, Keep Links, and Keep Tables toggles — when a toggle is off, the corresponding element type is stripped from the output rather than converted, and when Keep Tables is on, a dedicated table rule builds proper GitHub Flavored Markdown pipe-table syntax from the source `<table>` structure.

What Converts Cleanly, and What Doesn't

Structural and text-formatting HTML — headings, paragraphs, bold and italic text, links, images, ordered and unordered lists, blockquotes, and inline or fenced code — all map cleanly onto well-established Markdown equivalents, since Markdown was explicitly designed to cover exactly this common subset of formatting. What doesn't translate as cleanly is HTML used for visual layout rather than semantic structure — CSS-driven multi-column layouts, absolutely positioned elements, custom fonts and colors applied via inline styles, and complex nested `<div>`-based components generally have no Markdown equivalent at all, since Markdown intentionally has no concept of visual layout or styling beyond its basic formatting syntax. If your source HTML relies heavily on visual styling to convey meaning, expect the converted Markdown to preserve the content and basic structure while losing the specific visual presentation.

Choosing Which Elements to Keep or Strip

Keep images on when your destination supports Markdown image syntax and you have the rights to reuse the referenced images (remember that Markdown images just reference a URL — they don't embed the image data itself, so a converted image will only display correctly if that URL remains valid and accessible from wherever the Markdown is eventually rendered). Keep links on for any destination where clickable references matter, which is the common case; turn them off specifically when you want plain, unlinked text — for a printed document, a context where links would be meaningless, or a deliberately simplified summary. Keep tables on for structured data that genuinely benefits from a grid layout; turn them off if your target renderer doesn't support Markdown tables, or if the tabular structure doesn't carry meaningful information once linearized.

HTML to Markdown as Part of a Content Migration

Converting HTML to Markdown is frequently just one step in a larger content migration — moving a blog from a traditional CMS to a static site generator, converting an internal wiki's exported pages into a documentation system built around Markdown files, or archiving web content in a more portable, future-proof plain-text format. In these workflows, it's worth reviewing the converted output carefully rather than treating the conversion as fully automatic: complex source markup, unusual nesting, or heavy inline styling can occasionally produce Markdown that's technically valid but needs a manual pass to clean up formatting quirks before it's ready for its new destination.

FAQs

No. The conversion runs entirely inside your browser using the turndown JavaScript library, which parses your HTML using the browser's own native HTML parser and walks the resulting structure to produce Markdown, with no server-side component involved at any point. This means you can convert HTML from private documents, internal wikis, or unpublished drafts without any of that content ever leaving your device.

Turning off Keep Images removes every `<img>` element from the output entirely, rather than converting it to Markdown's image syntax — useful when you're moving content into a plain-text context where images can't be displayed anyway, or when a source page's images aren't ones you have rights to reuse. Turning off Keep Links removes the link wrapper but keeps the visible link text in place, so 'Visit our site' stays as plain text instead of becoming a Markdown link — useful for a context where clickable links don't matter, or where you specifically want plain text output. Turning off Keep Tables removes `<table>` elements and their contents entirely, since not every Markdown renderer supports Markdown tables, and sometimes tabular data doesn't translate meaningfully to a linear Markdown document anyway.

With Keep Tables on, each table is converted into GitHub Flavored Markdown's pipe-delimited table syntax — a header row, a separator row of dashes, and one data row per table row, with cells separated by pipe characters. The first row of your source table is always treated as the header row. If a row has fewer cells than the header (a common result of merged or missing cells in the original HTML), the missing cells are simply left blank in the output rather than causing an error, so the table structure stays valid Markdown even from imperfect source HTML.

Yes — standard inline and block-level formatting converts to its Markdown equivalent: `<strong>` and `<b>` become **bold** (double asterisks), `<em>` and `<i>` become *italic* (single asterisks), `<h1>` through `<h6>` become the matching number of hash marks, `<ul>`/`<ol>` become dash-prefixed or numbered lists, `<blockquote>` becomes a `>`-prefixed quote, and `<code>`/`<pre>` become inline code spans or fenced code blocks. This covers the vast majority of formatting found in real-world HTML content, from CMS exports to copy-pasted rich text.

Both work — you can paste a small snippet (a single paragraph or list) or an entire page's HTML including `<html>`, `<head>`, and `<body>` tags, since the underlying parser handles a full document structure and extracts the meaningful content regardless. That said, pasting a full page usually pulls in navigation, sidebar, and footer markup you probably don't want in your final Markdown, so for the cleanest result, it's usually better to copy just the specific content area (an article body, for instance) rather than an entire page.

Copy-pasting rendered text from a webpage into a plain text editor loses all formatting entirely — bold becomes plain text, links become plain text with no URL, and lists lose their bullet structure, leaving you with an undifferentiated block of text. This tool instead works from the underlying HTML markup itself, preserving the actual structure and formatting as proper Markdown syntax, so headings stay headings, links keep their URLs, and lists keep their bullets — meaningfully more useful than plain-text copy-paste whenever you need to preserve document structure, not just words.

Yes, though results depend on how clean the source site's markup is — most modern websites and CMS platforms produce reasonably well-structured HTML that converts cleanly, but sites with heavy inline styling, deeply nested `<div>` wrappers, or unusual custom markup may produce Markdown output with some extra noise or formatting quirks that need manual cleanup afterward. For the cleanest results, use your browser's 'Inspect Element' or 'View Page Source' to copy just the specific HTML for the content you want (an article body, for example) rather than an entire page.

Markdown is the expected input format for a huge range of modern tools and platforms — static site generators, GitHub and GitLab documentation, most blogging platforms, note-taking apps, and many CMS systems — all of which either require Markdown directly or handle it far more gracefully than raw HTML pasted into a rich-text field. Converting existing HTML content to Markdown is a common step when migrating content between platforms, moving a blog to a static site generator, or importing legacy documentation into a modern docs system that's built around Markdown source files.

HTML to Markdown handles converting existing markup into Markdown source. These related tools cover the reverse conversion and other nearby formats.

Markdown to HTML

DeveloperConvert Markdown back into HTML — the reverse of this tool.

Markdown Editor

DeveloperWrite and preview Markdown directly, with a live HTML preview and formatting toolbar.

HTML Minifier

DeveloperMinify HTML source before converting it, or minify HTML you generate from Markdown.

HTML Encoder/Decoder

DeveloperEscape or unescape HTML entities in text you're preparing to convert.