Clean the HTML before converting
HTML from word processors (Microsoft Word, Google Docs exported to HTML), email clients, and rich text editors is often cluttered with inline styles, span tags wrapping individual words, non-breaking spaces ( ), and empty paragraph tags. Strip or clean the HTML before pasting it into the converter. Browser developer tools can help: paste the HTML into the console, use document.body.innerHTML to view the simplified DOM, and copy the cleaner result.
Use the live preview to verify the output
Click "Preview rendered" to see the Markdown rendered as HTML. If headings appear in the wrong level, list items are incorrectly nested, or code blocks are not highlighted, you can identify the issue immediately without pasting into another tool. The preview renders the same output you would see on GitHub or in a standard Markdown viewer.
Handle divs and sections manually if needed
The converter treats div and section tags as generic block containers and outputs their text content with paragraph spacing. Very div-heavy HTML (typical of modern CMS output) may produce excessive blank lines. Enable "Collapse blank lines" to reduce these to a maximum of one blank line between elements, which is standard Markdown paragraph spacing.
For WordPress content, use the raw HTML source
WordPress stores post content in a mix of HTML and Gutenberg block comments. When migrating WordPress content to Markdown, export the raw HTML content (from the database or the Classic Editor HTML view) rather than the rendered page HTML. The rendered page HTML includes navigation, sidebar, footer, and other structural elements that produce a lot of unwanted noise in the conversion.
Preserve code blocks by using fenced style
Always use fenced code blocks (```) rather than 4-space indentation for code in your Markdown. Fenced blocks support language identifiers for syntax highlighting, are more visually distinctive in plain text, and are supported by all modern Markdown parsers. The 4-space indentation style is a legacy syntax from the original Markdown specification and less universally implemented in modern tools.