How to cite a website: write down the details when you open the page.

Record the details while the page is open

A website citation is assembled from facts printed on or around the page. Purdue’s MLA guide tells you to collect as much of the needed information as possible rather than expecting every element to exist. Keeping a short note for each source costs less than hunting for it again.

This guide uses MLA as its worked style because we could read the MLA Style Center and Purdue’s MLA pages. We could not open the APA Style page on web references while writing this, so it makes no claims about APA. If you were told to use APA, Chicago or another style, open that style’s own page for the exact punctuation.

What to write down

Purdue gives the MLA order for a web page as author, title, title of container, other contributors, version, number, publisher, publication date and location, where the location is a URL for an online source. Leave out any element the page does not provide.

• Author: a person or an organisation, if the page names one.
• Title of the page, copied as it appears.
• Name of the website it sits on (the “container” in MLA terms).
• Publisher, if it differs from the website name.
• Publication date, if the page shows one.
• The address of the page, copied from the browser.
• The date you opened it.

A fictional example

Imagine a fictional page on a fictional site. Dana Reyes wrote “Why We Stopped Using the Shared Inbox” for a site called Example Notes, dated 3 May 2026, at https://www.example.com/notes/shared-inbox?utm_source=newsletter. Following the order above, the entry would read: Reyes, Dana. “Why We Stopped Using the Shared Inbox.” Example Notes, 3 May 2026, www.example.com/notes/shared-inbox.

Two choices in that line come from Purdue’s MLA page: it suggests omitting query strings (the part starting with ?) when possible, and omitting http:// or https:// unless you are hyperlinking the source. The author, site and address are invented for illustration, and exact punctuation and name order can differ by edition, so check your style’s page.

When there is no date or author

If a page shows no author, start with the title; if it shows no date, leave the date out. These are the usual ways of handling missing elements, not a rule we could confirm from the pages above beyond Purdue’s advice to use what is available.

The date you opened the page matters most in that case. The MLA Style Center says an access date is not required for a reliable, stable source, but that you may add one if it will be useful, particularly for a work that lacks publication information or may change or be removed. It says the access date goes at the end of the entry. Purdue likewise calls it optional, for sources without a publication date or likely to change.

Check the citation against the page

The last point matters: some sites identify the page by a query string, and deleting it would send readers somewhere else. Test the shortened address before you rely on it.

• Open the address you wrote down. Does it reach the page you meant?
• Do the title, author and date match what the page shows, not what a search result showed?
• Does the page actually support the sentence you cite it for? A correct citation to the wrong page is still a mistake.
• Is the page one a reader can open without logging in?
• Did you remove tracking parameters but keep any part of the address that selects the page?

What this does not cover

A style guide decides punctuation, italics, the order of entries and how in-text citations look, and it can change between editions. Citation generators can fill in a template, but they copy whatever the page reports, so compare their output with the page. If an assignment or publisher names a specific edition, follow their instructions over this guide.

Use this next

• Check the links in your article before publishing
• Write a summary of an article in your own words
• Check an AI summary against its source