APA 7th edition
How to cite a website in APA 7th edition
Web pages often hide the author, the date, or both — and every style has a different rule for what to do when a required element simply does not exist.
THE FORMAT
A website in APA, at a glance
Author, A. A. (Year, Month Day). Title of the page in sentence case. Site Name. https://example.org/page
Renaud, C. (2023, April 18). How peer review changed after the pandemic. Open Science Notes. https://opensciencenotes.org/peer-review-shift
(Renaud, 2023)
In prose: Renaud (2023) describes editors quietly extending every deadline through 2021.
National Writing Center Association. (n.d.). Tutoring students who write in a second language. https://writingcenters.org/tutoring-multilingual-writers
In text: (National Writing Center Association, n.d.)
Copyeditor formats APA, MLA, Chicago and IEEE automatically — cite a source once and the references builds itself. See how citations work .
BEFORE YOU FORMAT
What APA needs from a website
Elements to collect
- Author — a person if one is credited, otherwise the organization
- Date of publication or last update
- Title of the specific page (not the whole site)
- Name of the website or publishing organization
- URL
- Date you accessed it, when the style requires one
Rules specific to this entry
- A standalone web page is italicized in APA 7 — it is a work in its own right, not a part of one. The site name that follows stays upright.
- When the author and the site are the same organization, name it once in the author position and drop the site name so the entry does not repeat itself.
- Give the most specific date the page carries, down to the day. Undated pages take (n.d.) in both the reference and the citation.
- Add “Retrieved Month Day, Year, from” before the URL only when the page is built to change without archiving — a wiki entry, a live dashboard, a rolling statistics table.
Building the entry, step by step
Collect the details
Before you format anything, gather every element APA needs for a website: Author — a person if one is credited, otherwise the organization; Date of publication or last update; Title of the specific page (not the whole site); Name of the website or publishing organization.
Build the references entry
Arrange those details in the APA order: Author, A. A. (Year, Month Day). Title of the page in sentence case. Site Name. https://example.org/page
Add the in-text citation
In the body of your paper, cite it as (Renaud, 2023) — or work the same reference into your sentence as Renaud (2023) describes editors quietly extending every deadline through 2021..
Check it against the exceptions
A standalone web page is italicized in APA 7 — it is a work in its own right, not a part of one. The site name that follows stays upright.
APA RULES
The conventions behind every APA entry
Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (7th ed.) is the authority. Where a journal or department publishes its own house rules, those win — check your submission guidelines before the references is final.
The rules that apply across every source — author order, capitalization, how the references is sorted, and where APA entries most often go wrong — are collected on the APA 7th edition guide.
The same website in another style
Switching styles late in a draft is normal. Here is the same source formatted five other ways.
Questions about APA and websites
What if the website has no author?
Move the title into the author position and alphabetize by the first significant word of that title — ignoring an initial “A”, “An” or “The”. In the text, use a shortened form of the title where the author name would go.
What do I need before I can cite a website?
Author — a person if one is credited, otherwise the organization, Date of publication or last update, Title of the specific page (not the whole site), and the rest of the elements listed above. Web pages often hide the author, the date, or both — and every style has a different rule for what to do when a required element simply does not exist.
Is there anything unusual about a website in APA?
A standalone web page is italicized in APA 7 — it is a work in its own right, not a part of one. The site name that follows stays upright.
What else catches people out here?
When the author and the site are the same organization, name it once in the author position and drop the site name so the entry does not repeat itself.
Can I reformat this website in another style later?
By hand, you would retype the entry — the element order, punctuation and italics all differ between styles. In Copyeditor, sources are stored as structured data, so switching between APA, MLA, Chicago and IEEE reformats every citation and the whole reference list at once.
Cite it once
and never reformat it again
Copyeditor keeps sources as structured data, so switching between APA, MLA, Chicago and IEEE reformats every citation and the whole references at once.
