The difference between "How to Build a Website from Scratch" and "How to build a website from scratch" seems trivial until you are managing a site with 50 pages that use both styles inconsistently. I noticed this on my own site during a content audit. Some headings used title case, others used sentence case, and a few used all caps for no apparent reason. The inconsistency looked unprofessional even though the content underneath was solid. Fixing it took longer than it should have because I had not settled on a standard from the start.
Title case and sentence case are the two dominant capitalisation styles for headings, titles, and labels. Each has clear advantages depending on context. The case converter handles both conversions, but knowing which to choose matters more than knowing how to convert.
What Title Case Looks Like
Title case capitalises the first letter of major words in a heading. Minor words like "a", "an", "the", "and", "but", "or", "in", "on", "at", "to", "for", and "of" stay lowercase unless they are the first or last word. The result looks formal and structured: "The Quick Brown Fox Jumps Over the Lazy Dog".
The tricky part is defining "major" and "minor" words, because different style guides disagree. AP style capitalises all words of four or more letters. Chicago style capitalises all words except articles, prepositions, and coordinating conjunctions. APA style capitalises words of four or more letters plus all verbs, nouns, adjectives, adverbs, and pronouns regardless of length. This means "Is" gets capitalised in APA and Chicago but might not in some other systems.
These differences are why I built the title case option in the case converter to follow the most widely accepted rules: capitalise all words except short prepositions, articles, and conjunctions. It handles the most common cases correctly and produces results that look right across contexts.
What Sentence Case Looks Like
Sentence case capitalises only the first word and proper nouns, exactly like a regular sentence. "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" becomes a heading that reads naturally and casually. It is the standard in most non-American English-speaking countries and has become increasingly popular in digital interfaces.
Sentence case is simpler to apply consistently because the rules are straightforward: capitalise the first word and proper nouns, lowercase everything else. There is no debate about whether "with" or "between" should be capitalised. This simplicity is why Google, Apple, and most modern software interfaces use sentence case for their UI elements.
When to Use Title Case
Title case works best for formal publications, book titles, academic papers, and contexts where tradition matters. If you are writing for a publication that follows AP or Chicago style, title case is expected for headlines and section headings. Academic papers following APA format require title case for paper titles and level 1 and 2 headings.
Marketing materials often use title case because the capitalisation adds visual weight. A call to action like "Start Your Free Trial Today" feels more prominent than "Start your free trial today". Whether this actually affects conversion rates is debatable, but the convention is deeply established in advertising and marketing copy.
Blog post titles and article headlines commonly use title case because it distinguishes the title from body text more strongly. This site uses title case for page titles and article headings for exactly that reason. The visual distinction between a title-case heading and sentence-case body text creates clear hierarchy without relying on font size alone.
When to Use Sentence Case
Sentence case suits digital interfaces, casual communications, and content that prioritises readability over formality. Button labels, menu items, form labels, and notification messages read more naturally in sentence case. "Save your changes" feels like a helpful instruction. "Save Your Changes" feels like a formal announcement.
Internal documentation, wikis, and knowledge bases work well in sentence case because the content is meant to be scanned quickly. Title case in a table of contents with 30 entries creates visual noise where sentence case keeps things calm and easy to scan.
European and Australian English tend toward sentence case for headings in both print and digital contexts. If your audience is primarily outside North America, sentence case may feel more natural to them. I write for an Australian audience primarily, which is part of why I lean toward sentence case for most contexts outside of main page titles.
Consistency Matters More Than Choice
The worst option is mixing styles without a clear system. A page where the H1 uses title case, the H2 uses sentence case, and the H3 uses all caps looks like it was written by three different people who never spoke to each other. Pick one style for each heading level and apply it uniformly across your entire site.
My recommendation for most websites: title case for page titles and H1 headings, sentence case for H2 and below. This gives main headings visual prominence while keeping subheadings readable and scannable. It is the pattern used by many successful content sites and it creates a natural visual hierarchy.
If you have existing content with inconsistent capitalisation, the case converter makes bulk conversion quick. Paste your headings in, select the target case, and you get consistent output in seconds. I used it to fix 50 headings across my own site in about ten minutes, which was considerably faster than editing each one manually in the CMS.
Edge Cases and Common Mistakes
Hyphenated words cause confusion in title case. "Self-Driving Cars" or "Self-driving Cars"? Most style guides capitalise both parts of a hyphenated compound if both are major words. So "Self-Driving" is correct in title case because both "self" and "driving" are significant words.
Words after colons follow different rules depending on your style guide. AP capitalises the first word after a colon. Chicago only capitalises it if what follows is a complete sentence. When in doubt, capitalise it. Nobody will notice if you capitalise a word that should technically be lowercase, but a lowercase word where capitalisation is expected looks like a mistake.
Acronyms and proper nouns stay capitalised in both styles. "How to Use the NASA API" is correct in both title case and sentence case because NASA and API are always capitalised. The case converter preserves all-caps words for this reason.