How to cite a website in APA 7 (with examples)

How to · Updated 2026-11-10

An APA 7 web page reference is author, date, title in italics, site name and link. Here is the pattern, a worked example and what to do with no author or no date.

To cite a website in APA 7, write the author, the date in brackets, the page title in italics, the site name and the web address, in that order. The citation generator builds it for you: choose Web page and APA 7, type what you can see on the page, and copy the finished reference with its italics.

What you need

Open the page you want to cite and look for five things. Most sit at the top or bottom of the article.

• Who wrote it. A person, or an organisation if no person is named.
• When it was published or last updated. Year, and the month and day if shown.
• The title of the page. The headline of the article, not the name of the whole site.
• The site name. For example the name of the charity, magazine or council that runs the site.
• The full web address (URL). Copy it from the address bar.

If one is missing, that is normal; see below for what APA does.

Step by step

The pattern for a web page in APA 7 is:

Family name, Initials. (Year, Month Day). Title of the page. Site Name. URL

• Family name, Initials: “Chidi Daniel Okafor” becomes “Okafor, C. D.”. Two authors are joined with ”&”; up to 20 authors are all listed.
• (Year, Month Day): the date goes in round brackets straight after the author, followed by a full stop.
• Title of the page: in italics and in sentence case, which means only the first word and names get capitals.
• Site Name: plain text. Leave it out when it is the same as the author, so a page by a weather office on its own site does not name the office twice.
• URL: the link goes last, with no full stop after it, so nobody copies a stray dot into their browser.

In the citation generator:

1. Set What is it? to Web page and Style to APA 7.
2. In Authors, one per line, type each person as “Family, Given”, for example “Okafor, Chidi Daniel”. For an organisation, type its name on one line with no comma.
3. Type the Title of the page in sentence case. The tool keeps your capitals as you typed them.
4. Fill in Website name, Year, Month and Day.
5. Paste the address into Web address.
6. Leave Date you looked at it empty for a normal article. Fill it only for a page that is meant to change, such as a live data table; APA then writes “Retrieved [date], from” before the link.
7. Read the reference under 2. Your citation, then press Copy to paste it into Word or Google Docs with the italics kept, or Add to my list to build a reference list.

A worked example

You used an online article called “Why city trees cool streets at night”, written by Chidi Daniel Okafor and posted on a site called Urban Green Notes on 18 June 2025, at https://example.org/trees-cool-streets. (All of these are made up.)

The five parts are:

• Author: Okafor, C. D.
• Date: (2025, June 18)
• Title: Why city trees cool streets at night
• Site: Urban Green Notes
• URL: https://example.org/trees-cool-streets

Put together, the APA 7 reference reads:

Okafor, C. D. (2025, June 18). Why city trees cool streets at night. Urban Green Notes. https://example.org/trees-cool-streets

In your essay, the matching in-text citation is (Okafor, 2025), or “Okafor (2025) found that…” when the name is part of the sentence.

Now a page with no named person and no date: “Heat safety tips for students” on the World Weather Office’s own site. Type “World Weather Office” as the author, leave Year empty, and the tool writes “(n.d.)”, short for “no date”. Because the site and the author are the same, the site name is dropped:

World Weather Office. (n.d.). Heat safety tips for students. https://example.org/heat-tips

If your teacher asks for a different style, switch Style to MLA 9 or Harvard and the same details come out in that layout, with nothing to type again.

Check your answer

• Read it left to right. Who, when, what, where: author, date, title, site, link. If the title comes before the author, you probably left the author box empty.
• Only the title is italic. In APA, the site name of a web page is plain text.
• Initials, not first names. If you see “Chidi Daniel Okafor” written out in full at the start of an APA reference, the name was typed without a comma, so the tool treated it as an organisation. Retype it as “Okafor, Chidi Daniel”.
• The in-text citation matches. The family name and year in your essay should be the first two things in the reference list entry, so a reader can find it.
• Count the cost. Many courses leave the reference list out of the word limit. Paste only the body of your essay into the word counter if that is your rule.

Questions people ask

What if the page has no author? Use the organisation that published it. If there is truly no one, leave the author box empty and the title moves to the front, followed by the date.

Do I need “Retrieved from” in APA 7? Usually not. APA 7 dropped it for most pages. Add the date you looked only for pages that are designed to change over time.

How do I put my references into Zotero or EndNote? Add each source to the list, then press Download .ris or Download .bib. If you already have a messy BibTeX file, tidy it first with the bibTeX cleaner.