How to cite a website in APA format

There are two ways to cite a website in APA format – the automatic way, and the manual way.

The easy way to cite a website in APA format

We can cite a website for you automatically (and for free) with our citation generator below. Simply paste the page URL into the search box (or search for some keywords) and then click on the result we find. We’ll find all the details you need and format it correctly, ready for you to copy into your paper.

The manual way to cite a website in APA format

To cite a website by hand just follow the instructions below.

First, you need to locate these details for the website: page or article author, page or article title, website name, published date, access date, page URL (web address).

• The author can typically be found on the page, but if there isn’t one listed you can use the website name in its place.
• The page title can be found near the top of the page, and you can also find it by hovering your mouse over the browser tab.
• The website name can usually be found in the web address or by looking for a logo or similar at the very top of the page.
• There often isn’t a publish date, but if there is it’ll be very close to the page title.
• The access date is the date you took information from the article (usually today).
• The page URL can be copied straight from the address bar of your browser and will start with either http:// or https://.

Then use this template, replacing the colored placeholders with the information you found on the page:

Author last name, Author first name initial. (Published year, Published month and day). Page title. Retrieved Accessed month and day, Accessed year, from Article URL.

The final formatted citation should look like this:

What to do when there’s no author

Often you’ll find a webpage doesn’t have a clear personable author, and in this case you can substitute the page title in the place of the author instead. Adapting the example above would look like this:

What about multiple authors?

When the page has multiple authors you should include each of them in the same format, separated by a comma. The last author should also be separated by an ‘&’. For example