How to Cite a Website in APA (7th Edition)

A standard APA 7 webpage reference runs: Author, Initials. (Year, Month Day). Title of the page in italics. Site Name. URL. For example: Nguyen, R. (2023, March 14). How spaced repetition actually works. Learning Science Weekly. https://example.com/spaced-repetition. If the site name and the author are the same organization, the site name is dropped from the end to avoid repeating it.

For the in-text citation, a website source follows the same author-date rule as any other APA source: (Nguyen, 2023) parenthetically, or Nguyen (2023) if you're naming the author in your sentence. A page number isn't available for most web content, so it's simply left out unless the page has stable numbered sections or paragraphs you're directly quoting from.

No individual author is the most common gap. When a page is published by an organization rather than a named writer — a university's advising page, a company's blog post with no byline — APA 7 says to use the organization as the author instead of leaving the field blank or skipping straight to the title. In-text, that becomes (Learning Science Weekly, 2023) or the organization's name written out in a narrative citation, the same as it would be for a personal author.

No publication date is the second common gap, especially for reference or evergreen pages that aren't dated the way a news article or blog post is. APA 7's answer is to use "n.d." (no date) in place of the year, both in the reference-list entry and in the in-text citation: (Learning Science Weekly, n.d.). It's not a workaround — it's the format's actual, documented answer for exactly this case.

APA 7 generally doesn't require a retrieval date for a webpage, on the reasoning that most cited pages stay reasonably stable after publication. The exception is a page whose content is likely to change over time — a wiki entry, a live dashboard, an evolving social media profile, or any source without version history. For those, add "Retrieved Month Day, Year, from" before the URL, so a reader can find the version you actually saw.

This is also where a citation generator earns its keep: it can pull the author, date, and title from a pasted URL automatically instead of you copying each field by hand. StudyPilot's citation generator does this for APA, alongside MLA, Chicago, Harvard, IEEE, and Vancouver — though it's still worth a quick manual check on pages with no listed author or date specifically, since auto-extraction is more likely to miss a field that isn't clearly marked on the page than to misformat one that is.