Cite a website in Harvard
Citing a plain website in Harvard is harder than it looks because most pages lack a clear author, date, or publisher. Harvard (Cite Them Right 12) tells you what to do when those fields are missing, and how to format the access date when the page might change later.
Harvard 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.
- Begin the URL with 'Available at:' and end with the access date.
Worked example
Harvard · websiteA real website formatted using the Harvard rules above.
NASA (2024) About NASA. [Online] NASA. Available at: https://www.nasa.gov/about/ (accessed January 15, 2025).
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Citation fields
Harvard website citation guide
What Harvard referencing actually is
Harvard is less a single rulebook than a family of author-date styles, and that is the first thing to understand before citing a website. Unlike APA or MLA, there is no central organisation that owns Harvard, so your university's own Harvard guide — often based on Cite Them Right — is the authority you must follow. The widely used Cite Them Right version gives a website the pattern: Author or organisation (Year) Title of page. Available at: URL (Accessed: Day Month Year). The rules below follow that common convention, but always check your department's variant for small differences in punctuation.
The defining features of a Harvard web reference are the Available at: label before the URL and the Accessed date in parentheses at the end. These two elements are what mark a reference as Harvard rather than APA, and leaving them out is the most common error. The year sits in parentheses right after the author, matching the in-text author-date citation, which is the backbone of every Harvard-family style.
Author, year, and title for a web page
Identify the author using the familiar order: a named person first, then the organisation responsible for the site, and only the title moved forward if neither exists. Harvard is comfortable with corporate authors, so a government page is authored by the department. The year in parentheses is the year the page was published or last updated; if no date is available, Harvard uses (no date) written out, rather than APA's abbreviated n.d., though some institutional variants do accept n.d.
The page title in Cite Them Right Harvard is given in italics for a standalone web page, which differs from APA's plain page title and MLA's quotation marks — a genuine point of divergence worth checking against your guide. The title is followed by a full stop, then the Available at: element. Because Harvard variants disagree on whether the page title or the site name is italicised, the safest move is to follow your university's example entries exactly rather than assuming the convention from another style.
Available at, access dates, and in-text form
The URL is introduced with Available at: and given in full. Because web content changes, Harvard requires an access date for online sources, placed in parentheses immediately after the URL as (Accessed: 15 January 2025), with the month written in full. This access date is not optional in most Harvard guides, which is a stricter stance than APA takes. Strip any tracking parameters from the URL and never use a library proxy link, since the reference must be usable by any reader.
In text, Harvard uses author and year in parentheses: (NASA, 2024). For a direct quotation Harvard adds the page or, for an unpaginated web page, you simply cite author and year, as there is no page to give. When the author is named in your sentence, only the year goes in brackets: NASA (2024) states that... Use the generator below to assemble the reference, then verify the Harvard-specific elements: the Available at: label, the full-month access date in parentheses, and the year sitting directly after the author.