HTML to Markdown Converter

What is Markdown, and why convert HTML to it?

Markdown is a lightweight markup language that formats plain text with a few simple symbols: # for headings, * for emphasis, - for lists, and [text](url) for links. It was created by John Gruber in 2004 to be easy to read and write, then render to HTML.

Converting HTML to Markdown strips a page down to its content and structure, throwing away the <div> soup, inline styles, scripts, and tracking markup. The result is clean, portable text that is smaller, easier to version-control, and far cheaper to feed to a large language model.

How to convert HTML to Markdown

Paste your HTML into the box above and the converter returns Markdown instantly. It walks the markup and maps each element to its Markdown equivalent: <h1> becomes #, <strong> becomes **bold**, <a> becomes a [link](url), and <ul> and <ol> become bullet and numbered lists.

You can paste a full page or a single fragment. Anything that is not real content (scripts, styles, comments, and empty wrappers) is dropped, so you get just the readable text.

How to convert a URL or web page to Markdown

Switch to URL mode, paste any public page, and the tool fetches the live HTML and converts it to Markdown in one step. This is the fastest way to turn a blog post, documentation page, or article into clean Markdown without copying and pasting.

A plain fetch works for most server-rendered pages. For pages that render with JavaScript, sit behind a login or a Cloudflare challenge, or that you need to convert in bulk, the ScreenshotRender API returns the same clean Markdown for any URL through a single call. If you would rather capture the page visually, the Webpage to Image tool renders it to PNG instead.

Convert HTML to Markdown for LLMs, RAG, and AI

Large language models work best with Markdown, not raw HTML. Markup tags, classes, and inline styles waste tokens and add noise that can confuse a model, while Markdown keeps the headings, lists, and emphasis that actually carry meaning. Converting first means more of your context window holds real content.

This is why Markdown is the default format for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines, prompt context, and fine-tuning datasets. Convert each page to Markdown, chunk it on its headings, and you have clean, structured input for embeddings or a prompt without the HTML overhead.

What this HTML to Markdown converter supports

The converter handles the common HTML elements and maps them to standard and GitHub Flavored Markdown:

• Headings: <h1> through <h6> become # to ######.
• Text: <strong> and <b> to **bold**, <em> and <i> to *italic*.
• Links and images: <a> to [text](url) and <img> to ![alt](src), with relative URLs resolved to absolute in URL mode.
• Lists: ordered and unordered lists, including nested lists, become - and 1. items.
• Code: <code> becomes inline code and <pre> becomes a fenced code block.
• Tables, quotes, and rules: <table> becomes a GitHub-style table, <blockquote> becomes a quote, and <hr> becomes a horizontal rule.

Convert HTML to Markdown in Python

If you need to convert HTML to Markdown in code, Python has two common libraries. markdownify gives you a one-line md(html) call with options for heading style and link handling, and html2text turns full pages into Markdown with fine control over wrapping and images.

Both are great for batch jobs and notebooks. To convert a live URL rather than a string of HTML, fetch the page first (for example with requests) and pass the HTML to the converter, or call a hosted API that does the fetch and the conversion in one step.

Convert HTML to Markdown in JavaScript and Node

In JavaScript, the standard library is Turndown. It runs in both the browser and Node, converts an HTML string with new TurndownService().turndown(html), and supports plugins for GitHub Flavored Markdown features like tables and strikethrough.

For a server-side workflow in Node, fetch the page, pass the response body to Turndown, and write the Markdown to disk or a database. That is essentially what this tool does, so you can prototype here and move to code when you are ready.

Convert rich text, Google Docs, and Word to Markdown

When you copy from Google Docs, Microsoft Word, or a web page, your clipboard usually carries HTML behind the rich text. Paste that HTML here and the tool converts it straight to Markdown, so headings, bold, links, and lists survive the move.

It is a quick way to bring a formatted document into a Markdown-based system like a README, a static-site post, a wiki, or a notes app, without reformatting everything by hand.

HTML to Markdown vs Markdown to HTML

The two conversions are opposites. HTML to Markdown simplifies rendered markup into plain, portable text, which is what you want for writing, storage, and feeding content to an LLM. Markdown to HTML does the reverse, turning Markdown source into the HTML a browser displays, which is what a static-site generator does at publish time.

Markdown also allows raw HTML inside it, so an element this converter cannot map cleanly can be left as HTML and most Markdown renderers will still display it. If you need the other direction, a Markdown-to-HTML converter or any static-site framework will render your Markdown to a web page.