Free Table of Contents Generator

A table of contents lets readers see what a long article covers and jump straight to the part they came for. Paste your article as HTML or Markdown and this generator pulls out its headings, keeps their hierarchy, and writes a list of anchor links you can copy as HTML or Markdown. It also previews the headings it found and counts your H2 sections and H3 subsections, which makes it a quick outline check too.

What it reads. HTML headings, h1 to h6, written with the opening and closing tag on the same line; any tags inside a heading, such as bold or links, are stripped from its text. If the input contains no HTML heading at all, it reads Markdown instead: lines that start with one to six # characters followed by a space. When both are present, only the HTML headings are used. Text pasted straight from Google Docs or Word arrives without heading markup, so download the document as HTML or Markdown first, or convert it with the HTML to Markdown converter.

How anchors are made. Each heading becomes a slug: lowercased, with everything except the letters a–z, digits, spaces and hyphens removed, spaces turned into hyphens, repeated hyphens merged, and hyphens trimmed from the ends. "What Is SEO? (2026 Guide)" becomes #what-is-seo-2026-guide. Two headings with the same text get the same anchor, and headings written in non-Latin scripts lose those letters, so rename duplicates or set those anchors by hand.

The step most people miss: the generator writes the links, not the targets. A link to #what-is-seo-2026-guide only jumps if the matching heading carries id="what-is-seo-2026-guide". In the WordPress block editor, select the heading and paste the slug into the HTML anchor field under Advanced. Many Markdown renderers and static site generators add heading IDs automatically, but each uses its own slug rules, so after pasting, click one link with symbols or accents in it to confirm it lands.

Worked example. Paste four Markdown lines: # Keyword Research Guide, ## What Is Keyword Research?, ### Search Intent and ## How to Find Keywords. The Markdown output is a four-item list: [Keyword Research Guide](#keyword-research-guide) at the margin, the two H2 links indented two spaces, and [Search Intent](#search-intent) indented four. The HTML output wraps the same links in a nav element with nested lists, and the counters show 4 headings, 2 H2 sections and 1 H3 subsection.

Common mistakes. The page title is usually the H1, and it is included in the output, so delete that line when the table sits under the title. Very deep tables are hard to scan; for most posts, keep H2 and H3 entries and drop the rest. In Markdown mode, a code sample whose lines begin with # (shell comments, for instance) is read as headings, so remove those lines from the input. And a table of contents can only be as clear as the headings it lists, so check the outline with the heading structure checker first.

What Google says. A 2009 post by Google's snippets team on named anchors advised breaking long, multi-topic pages into distinct sections, giving each an anchor with a descriptive name rather than "Section 2.1", and including a table of contents that links to those anchors, noting that section links appear in results only for queries where they are useful. Google's current snippet documentation describes "Read more" deep links to a section of a page and asks that the content be visible without opening tabs or expanders, that the page not use JavaScript to control scroll position on load, and that scripts not strip the # fragment from the URL. None of this guarantees section links. Google's SEO Starter Guide also says heading order doesn't matter to Google Search, though a logical order helps screen reader users.

Skribra writes every article with a logical heading hierarchy, so adding a table of contents is a paste away, and publishes it straight to your CMS.