Home · Website
How to cite a website
Web pages are the ones people get wrong, because the author and the date are often not where you expect and sometimes are not there at all.
DOI, ISBN and PubMed lookups go directly from your browser to Crossref, OpenLibrary or NCBI. We do not receive your identifier. Web links need details you enter yourself. How this works · Privacy
The same source in all seven styles
One page, a World Health Organization briefing, in all seven styles. These are not typed out by hand: they come from the same formatter that writes your reference above, so what you read here is what you will get.
APA 7
World Health Organization. (2024). Air quality and health. https://www.who.int/
MLA 9
World Health Organization. "Air quality and health." World Health Organization, 2024. https://www.who.int/.
Harvard
World Health Organization (2024) Air quality and health. Available at: https://www.who.int/
Chicago 18
World Health Organization. "Air quality and health." 2024. https://www.who.int/.
IEEE
World Health Organization, "Air quality and health," 2024. [Online]. Available: https://www.who.int/
Vancouver
World Health Organization. Air quality and health. 2024. Available from: https://www.who.int/
AMA 11
World Health Organization. Air quality and health. Published 2024. https://www.who.int/
Plain text cannot carry italics. Where a style italicises a title, apply it in your document after pasting.
What you need, and where to find it
Author
A named person if the page carries a byline. Otherwise the organisation that publishes the site.
Date
The date the page was published or last updated, usually near the top or the very bottom. If there is none, that is n.d.
Page title
The heading of the page you actually read, not the name of the site.
Site name
The publication the page sits inside, which is the container.
URL
The address of that page. It should open the thing you read, first click, no login.
Accessed date
The day you read it. Optional in MLA 9, usually required in Harvard, and in APA only for pages designed to change.
Where people go wrong
No date is an answer, not a problem
Write n.d. and move on. Do not take the year out of the copyright line in the footer: that is the site's year, not the page's, and it changes every January while the page stays put.
Cite the page, not the front door
If you read a briefing three levels down, the reference points at the briefing. A homepage URL makes a marker hunt for what you meant, and it is the fastest way to look like you did not read it.
An organisation is the author or the site name, not both
When the World Health Organization publishes a page on its own site, naming it twice reads as a mistake. APA 7 says drop the repeat outright, and the generator does that for you.
Questions
Do I need an accessed date?
In APA 7 only for content designed to change, such as a live dashboard or a wiki page. MLA 9 makes it optional and recommends it. Most Harvard guides require it. When in doubt, including it costs nothing.
What about a page that might disappear?
Save it to a web archive first, then cite the archived address. A dead link in a bibliography is worth roughly as much as no reference at all.
Can I cite a social media post this way?
Not with this form. Posts have their own shape in every style, usually including the handle and the post's own text as the title. It is on the list, and until it is here you would be filling in fields that do not fit.
Citing something else?
Or read the rules for one style
THE ANDROID APP
Keep them, export them, and check your draft
CiteRight for Android keeps references in projects, exports a bibliography in any of the six styles, and checks a draft sentence by sentence for text that overlaps a source.