Cite a website in APA 7
Citing a plain website in APA 7 is harder than it looks because most pages lack a clear author, date, or publisher. APA 7 (2020) tells you what to do when those fields are missing, and how to format the access date when the page might change later.
APA 7 rules for a website
- Use the page author if there is one, otherwise the organisation, otherwise the page title.
- Use the publication date if visible, otherwise the copyright year, otherwise n.d.
- Page title is in quotes, site name (container) is italicized.
- Include the full URL at the end without a trailing period in APA.
- Add an access or retrieval date if the page content is likely to change.
- Use 'Retrieved DD Month YYYY, from URL' for sources that may change.
Worked example
APA 7 · websiteA real website formatted using the APA 7 rules above.
NASA (2024, March 12). About NASA. *NASA*. https://www.nasa.gov/about/
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Citation fields
APA 7 website citation guide
Why APA 7 makes websites harder than they look
Most students reach for a website citation expecting the four tidy fields they get with a book: author, year, title, publisher. Web pages rarely cooperate. The author might be a person, an organisation, or nobody named at all. The date might be a clear publication date, a vague copyright year in the footer, or missing entirely. The publisher and the site name might be the same thing, or two different things, or buried in a logo. APA 7 exists precisely to give you a rule for each of those gaps, so the goal is not to invent missing fields but to follow APA's substitution order when a field is absent.
The core APA 7 web reference is: Author. (Year, Month Day). Title of the page. Site Name. URL. When the author is an organisation that is also the site, APA tells you to drop the duplicate site name rather than print NASA twice. When there is no date, you use (n.d.) rather than guessing. When the page is likely to change, such as a live statistics dashboard, you add a retrieval date. Knowing those three substitutions handles the large majority of awkward web pages you will meet in undergraduate work.
Finding the author, date, and site name
Look for the author in this order: a named individual byline, then the organisation that runs the page, then, only if both are missing, move the page title into the author position. Do not use the webmaster, the CMS, or the URL domain as an author. For the date, prefer a visible publication or last-updated date on the page itself over the copyright year in the footer, because the footer year often just reflects the current calendar year and tells you nothing about when the content was written.
The site name is the name of the overall website, formatted in title case, and it sits in the source position after the page title. The page title itself goes in sentence case and is not italicised for a standalone web page. The most common mistake here is reversing those two: italicising the page title or putting the site name in quotes. APA keeps the smaller work (the page) plain and names the larger work (the site) as the source.
URLs, retrieval dates, and in-text form
End the reference with the full, working URL and no full stop after it, because a trailing period can be mistaken for part of the link. Strip tracking parameters such as utm_source before you paste, since they make the URL longer and can break or expire. Do not hyperlink the URL in a printed reference list unless your instructor asks for it. A retrieval date, written as Retrieved Month Day, Year, from URL, is only needed when the content at that URL is designed to change over time and is not archived; a stable article or About page does not need one.
In text, an APA 7 web citation uses the author and year, for example (NASA, 2024) or, with no date, (NASA, n.d.). If you quote directly from a page with no page numbers, point the reader to a heading or paragraph number instead. Paste your finished reference into the generator below to check field order and punctuation, then verify the live page still shows the same author and date before you submit, because web sources can be edited silently after you cite them.