Citing a website in APA style follows one pattern, and once you learn it you can cite almost any page. The pattern for the reference list is: Author. (Date). Title of page. Site Name. URL. Each part has rules, and the tricky cases, missing authors, missing dates, and organisation authors, are where most students lose marks.
Step 1: Find the author
Look for a byline at the top of the page, an author note at the bottom, or an About page. Write the author as surname followed by initials: Smith, J. A. If the page is written by an organisation, use the organisation’s full name: World Health Organization. If no author can be found at all, do not invent one: move the title to the author position and start the citation with the title. In the in-text citation for a missing author, use the title, shortened if it is long, in place of the name.
Step 2: Find the date
Use the most specific date the page gives: year, month, and day if available, as in (2024, March 15). If only a year is shown, use the year alone. If no date appears anywhere, use (n.d.), which stands for no date. Do not use the date you accessed the page, and do not use a last reviewed date as if it were the publication date. Under APA 7th edition, a retrieval date is only needed for content that changes over time without a stable version, such as a wiki page. For an ordinary article, leave the retrieval date out.
Step 3: Write the title and site name
Write the page title in sentence case: capitalise only the first word, the first word after a colon, and proper nouns. Italicise the title. Then add the site name, but only if it differs from the author. If the author is the organisation that runs the site, the site name is usually the same, so you leave it out rather than repeating it. This is a small rule that many guides get wrong, and it is an easy way to make your reference list look professional.
Step 4: Add the URL
Copy the direct link to the specific page, not to the site’s homepage. Test the link before you submit: a broken or redirected link undermines the citation. Do not add a period after the URL, because a trailing period can be mistaken for part of the address. Avoid URLs with session IDs or tracking parameters if a clean permalink is available, and prefer a DOI over a URL when the source provides one, though DOIs are rare for ordinary web pages.
Worked example
Putting it together, a complete reference looks like this: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2021, March 15). COVID-19 vaccination: What you need to know. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/yourvaccination.html. Note that the site name is omitted because the author and the site are the same organisation. The in-text citation for this source is (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2021) for a paraphrase, or with a paragraph number for a direct quote from a page with no page numbers, such as (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2021, para. 3).
Common mistakes
Writing titles in title case instead of sentence case is the most frequent error. Italicising the site name instead of the title is another. A third is including a retrieval date for every web source, a leftover habit from older APA editions. Finally, check consistency: every in-text citation must have a matching reference entry, and every reference entry must be cited in the text. A generator can assemble the parts for you, but you still need to check the author, date, and title yourself, because generators copy whatever metadata the page offers, including errors.
Try it free right here
Use the free Online Citation Generator Tool below, right on this page. It runs in your browser and needs no sign-up. You can also open the full tool here: Online Citation Generator Tool.