How to Cite a Website in APA Style: Format & Examples

Every student or researcher working with an academic text must know how to cite a website in APA 7th edition. You may think that it is not a big deal. However, let’s learn how to manage your citation together with our term paper writing service.

Our team prepared a short guide on how to cite a website APA. We will discuss the difference between APA website citations and a citation of an online article and how to check the formatting based on the 7th edition of the APA manual. 

All you need to know about in-text and reference citations is in one blog! Be sure it will be your great helper in academic writing.

As you may have noticed, there is a distinction between citing an entire website and a single page or publication. When referring to a website, you give credit to all the pages that have been published. For instance, you may mention TikTok (and give a link to it – tiktok.com) or the New York Public Library website (nypl.org). At the same time, you are not referring to any specific publication. 

Example of an entire website

Depending on whether you are citing a webpage or the entire website, your citation will look different. Let’s look at each specific instance and examples.

Most of the time, you will need to cite a specific publication on a website rather than the entire website. That is why we will first focus on how to organize and use an APA citation for a website appropriately. 

In general, students will use two types of citations in APA style:

Reference list citations are much more complicated. They include:

It may sound too difficult, but learning from actual examples of how to format an APA website citation will be easier to understand. Here you can find them. 

APA Citation Website Example

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APA website in-text citation is usually short. You shouldn’t integrate a long link to a specific page in the text body, especially when you are dealing with a research proposal or  literature review section. You don’t want to take up a lot of space, but still you need to clarify the source you are talking about. 

There are two ways of citing a website in the text: 

Choosing the right format of APA in-text citation for a website will depend on general text requirements and overall style. You can combine both types of citations in your research paper to make it more readable.

Check examples we prepared for students and researchers to learn more about the APA format for a website citation.

In-Text Citation APA Website: Format and Example

>> Read more: How to Do APA In-Text Citations

Another important thing is understanding how to cite a website in APA style. It may happen that you will refer not to a specific publication or author but to the whole website. 

For instance, you are researching social media and will need to mention it in a text. If you are not quoting the website, you do not need any formal citations to include. However, you may want to mention the URL in parentheses after the name of a website. 

For example, you are analyzing the new politics of Twitter and writing an article about it. You may say: 

You may need to cite a few types of articles for your work. First and foremost, APA 7th edition website citation may refer to research or magazine articles that were also published in a hard copy. However, if you are reading and using the online version, you must link to it. In this case, use the same guidelines as citing a journal article in APA. 

Also, you may use some resources published online only in your text. It can be a blog post, news, or announcement, and you will need to apply specific rules for this type of text. Let’s look at each of the types more precisely.

First, APA citation for websites of newspapers or magazines is quite similar to the citation of printed articles. You just need to put an URL after the source name. 

For the reference list, you will put usual details like the author’s name, exact day of publication, article title, publisher name and the publication URL. In some online publications, you may also find details on a volume, issue number and pages. If available, include this information as well. Make sure to italicize a publisher’s name if you are citing a webpage of a publication that also has a print edition. For in-text APA citation website sources, just include the author and the year of publication separated by comma. 

Let’s review a general structure to get better idea:

The format is basically the same for most online publications. You may see some slight variations (e.g., absence of a volume number in online newspapers). In this case, just skip this information and write down only available details. Let’s look at an APA citation of a web page found in a magazine.

As you can see, in this example the information on volume and issue numbers was missing, so we just omitted this part.

>> View more: How to Cite a Magazine Article in APA

For a research paper, you may also refer to news websites that don’t have a print edition such as BBC or CNN. What does it mean for the citation organization and formatting? If you are dealing with an online-only news site, you should italicize the title of the article and don’t apply any formatting to the website’s name. Here’s how an  APA citation for web pages from independent online news sites will look:

Now let’s explore a real-life example. Imagine that you need to cite news from the BuzzFeed for your analytical text:

>> Learn more: How to Cite a News Article APA 

Sometimes, you may need to cite a source or text written by 2 or more authors. It is not a problem, as APA guidelines provide specific rules for such cases. This is a common scenario that you will encounter while writing a term paper or another serious capstone project. 

The general principles for citing an online source with multiple authors are the same as citing a printed article with multiple authors. The structure of the citation will depend on how many authors you have – 2, 3 authors or more. Let's discuss each case in more detail.

Very often you will have to cite the work authored by 2 individuals. In this case, your full APA citation of a webpage with 2 authors will include both second names and separated by an ampersand (&). Use an ampersand in your parenthetical citation and “and” for narrative in-text citation. 

Here is a general structure:

It looks quite easy to remember. Let’s look at a real example from an academic paper.

How different will be citation formatting in case you have 3 or more authors? In this case, in-text citations will point only to the first author, and you will need to use “et al.” after their name. Looks unfair, but you will save a lot of space in your text. Sometimes you will work with articles with 10 or more authors and won’t put all their names into the in-text citation. Save it for your reference list.

If you are citing a web page written by up to 20 authors in the Reference List, include all the last names separated by commas and put an ampersand before the last author.

One more challenge that you may face is working with a web page that has no authors or was published by a group of authors or some organization. For example, a statement from Greenpeace on the official website won’t have an author's name but will rather sign in the organization's name. How to deal with this type of citation? You need to put the organization's name first!

For example, you are speaking about organizational values and want to cite it from the official web page. How will this citation look in your academic work?

For now, we are discussing cases when you have the organization's name that can be used as a source. But what will you do if there are no authors’ names at all? If it is impossible to identify who wrote a text, you need to replace the author's name with an article title. Your citation will start directly from the title.

Here is how it should be structured:

Such situations referring to no-author pages happen quite often, specifically when you are using news in your research. Let’s analyze the actual example from the academic paper.

What else can become a challenge to cite a website in APA? As you may noticed, when citing a source in a reference list, you need to include a year, month, and day of publication. But how to deal with pages that do not include a date? In this case, you must add n.d for reference and in-text citations.

Is it often the case when you can not indicate the date of publication? We would agree that it is quite an often situation. Here is what it looks like in our example:

There are common rules on using social media posts as a source for your academic texts. Instead of the article title, you need to mention the first 20 words of the post. Also, it is better to add specifications of media and indicate the type of multimedia you are using. 

The simple structure for citing social media posts will be like this:

Let’s take any post from social media and explain how to cite a website APA in practice.

>> Learn more: How to Cite a Tweet in APA

Another case researchers may have to deal with is citing a post on social media that was published by a username, not a real person. In this case, you may use the username instead of the author’s name. In case you know the real name, add a username after it in square brackets.

You may also need to make a reference in your work to a social media profile, not a concrete tweet or post. How to format it? Mention a day when you retrieved this account is important, as it may change or even be deleted in time.

While writing a dissertation, you will need to use many credible websites that do not include the author of publications. It will be official statements from the government, reports from organizations, or information from educational institutions. However, if students use those pages, they need to cite them appropriately. How to do this?

APA Government Website Citation

Government websites have a domain name ending with .gov. They can be used as a source of all official statements or decisions, results of elections, or other significant information produced by officials. How do we cite those web pages?

To make it more applicable for a specific case, let’s see how to organize the citation of an official government website.

>> Read more: How to Cite a Government Website APA

APA Educational Website Citation

To cite any publications made by educational institutions, you need to add a title of the selected page and the name of the institution to your reference list. The structure for such an APA website in-text citation and reference list is quite simple:

Educational institutions quite often became a main source for the research. If you are searching for publication on education research topics, you won’t have an author, but you will have general information about the research on the university webpage. Here is what it can look like.

APA Corporation Website Citation

The last complicated citation you may use for your research is citing a statement of a non-profit organization. It can be a citation of a report or mission statement. In this case, APA website citations won’t differ much from citations of government or educational organizations.

Non-profit organizations are a great source of specific data you may use for your research. Let’s look at the exact example we prepared for you.

Working with research is a long and complicated process. But we hope that citing your sources based on the APA style guide will be easy for anyone. 

We guided our students through all possible cases they may face and illustrated our explanation with real-life examples. Learn how to cite different sources, what types of in-text citations work best for various research, and how to deal with complicated cases when your source does not have authors or dates. 

Hopefully, this guide will support formatting and using web pages as sources for your academic research. And all examples we collected can be used as a template for specific cases. If you need more resources, feel free to browse our guide. From guides on how to cite a book in APA format to articles on citing a dictionary in APA, we did our best to cover every single case.