How to cite a website in APA and MLA

Citing a website is the most common citation task in any modern course, and it is also where the two big style guides differ most visibly. This guide gives you the exact skeleton for both current editions — APA 7 (2019) and MLA 9 (2021) — the standard fixes for missing information, and the handful of details that cost real marks. When you just need the reference built, the citation generator assembles both styles from a form; this article is for understanding what it is doing, and for the edge cases a form cannot judge.

APA 7: the format and an example

APA leads with the author and the date, because in the sciences when something was said matters almost as much as who said it. The skeleton for a page on a website:

Author, A. A. (Year, Month Day). Title of the page. Site Name. URL

A worked example:

• Chen, L. (2024, March 12). Why bridges resonate. Engineering Basics. https://example.com/bridges

The details that make it APA rather than approximately-APA: the author is surname-comma-initials, not full first names; the date sits in parentheses immediately after; the page title is in italics and sentence case (only the first word and proper nouns capitalised); the site name follows in plain roman type; and the URL is pasted bare — no "Retrieved from" prefix any more, that was APA 6, and writing it in 2026 quietly announces an out-of-date template. A retrieval date ("Retrieved August 29, 2026, from…") is added only when the page is designed to change over time — a wiki, a live statistics dashboard — not for ordinary articles.

MLA 9: the format and an example

MLA leads with the author and the title, because in the humanities the text itself is the object of study. The skeleton:

Author. "Title of the Page." Site Name, Day Month Year, URL.

The same source, MLA-style:

• Chen, Lin. "Why Bridges Resonate." Engineering Basics, 12 Mar. 2024, example.com/bridges.

Note everything that flipped: the author keeps their full first name; the page title goes in quotation marks and Title Case; the site name is what gets the italics; the date is written day-first with the month abbreviated; and MLA permits dropping the https:// prefix from the URL. Both styles format the finished list the same way — alphabetical by author, double-spaced, with a hanging indent (first line flush left, subsequent lines indented), which is a paragraph setting in your word processor, not something you build with spaces.

No author, no date, no problem

Web sources are missing things print sources rarely lack, and both styles have standard fixes rather than workarounds:

• No author: start the entry with the title, in both styles. Do not write "Anonymous", and check first whether the author is an organisation — a page on the WHO site with no byline is cited with WHO as a corporate author, which is the most commonly missed case.
• No date: APA writes (n.d.) in the date slot. MLA simply omits the date and instead appends an access date — "Accessed 29 Aug. 2026." — which is optional in general but recommended exactly here.
• No page title: rare, but describe the page in plain text without quotes or italics.

In-text citations, briefly

The reference list entry is half the job; the in-text marker is the other half. APA uses author-date: (Chen, 2024). MLA uses author-page, and since web pages have no page numbers, usually just (Chen). If there is no author, a shortened title stands in: ("Why Bridges Resonate"). The rule both styles share: whatever begins the reference list entry is what appears in the in-text citation, so a reader can jump from one to the other alphabetically. If you cite by title in the text, the entry must be alphabetised by title too.

The mistakes graders actually flag

Having graded and been graded, the recurring offenders are worth listing: mixing editions (an APA 6 "Retrieved from" inside an otherwise APA 7 list); italicising the wrong element — page title in APA, site name in MLA, never both; citing a whole site when you used one page of it; letting a citation generator's guess stand when the "author" it scraped is actually the site's name; and losing the hanging indent when pasting into the final document. The quiet skill is consistency — a list where every entry follows the same pattern reads as careful even before anyone checks the details. Word-count rules for essays are their own game; How many words is a page? covers it, and the word counter keeps you honest while you write. When the essay cites a book or journal article instead, the same generator handles those source types too.