Website Citation Generator

A website is the hardest source type to cite correctly, and it's not close. A journal article comes with a DOI that resolves to one exact record. A book has an ISBN. A website has whatever the page happens to show you: sometimes an author, sometimes not; sometimes a publish date, sometimes only a "last updated" stamp buried in the footer; sometimes nothing at all beyond a title and a logo. Every citation style has a rule for these gaps, and the rules don't agree with each other.

Paste a URL below and MakeCitation reads what the page actually contains, rather than asking you to fill in ten fields by hand. Where a source is missing something your style requires, you're told exactly what's missing instead of getting a citation that quietly guesses.

How the lookup works

Paste a link into the generator and it reads the page for a title, an author or publishing organization, and a date where one exists. That gets checked against what your chosen style actually requires: some styles want a specific access date, others don't ask for one once a page is stable and unlikely to change.

If the page gives you nothing to work with, which happens more often than you'd expect on older institutional sites, switch to manual entry and fill in whatever you can confirm yourself. No account is needed for either path. Free use covers single citations without a cap; signing in only becomes useful once you're formatting a whole reference list at once in batch mode, rather than one website at a time.

What actually changes between styles

The facts about a webpage don't change from style to style. What changes is how those facts get arranged, and whether the citation lives in the text itself or drops to a footnote.

Style	In-text form	Reference list	Order
APA	Parenthetical, author-date	References	Alphabetical
MLA	Parenthetical, author-page	Works Cited	Alphabetical
Chicago	Footnote or parenthetical (both supported)	Bibliography or References	Alphabetical
Harvard	Parenthetical, author-date	Reference list	Alphabetical
Vancouver	Numbered	References	Order of first citation
IEEE	Numbered, bracketed	References	Order of first citation
OSCOLA	Footnote only, no parenthetical form	Bibliography	Alphabetical
ASA	Parenthetical, author-date	References	Alphabetical
Turabian	Parenthetical, author-date	Bibliography	Alphabetical
CSE	Numbered or author-date, your choice	References or Cited References	Depends on the system chosen

This table describes structure, not a finished citation. The actual reference for your specific source, formatted correctly for whichever style you pick, comes from the same formatting engine that runs every generator page on this site, not from anyone typing it out by hand.

Live example · nasa.gov/humans-in-space

APA 7th Edition

NASA. (2022, December 2). Humans In Space - NASA. https://www.nasa.gov/humans-in-space/

In-text: (NASA, 2022)

MLA 9th Edition

"Humans In Space - NASA." NASA, https://www.nasa.gov/humans-in-space/.

In-text: (Humans In Space - NASA)

Chicago

NASA. 2022. "Humans In Space - NASA." https://www.nasa.gov/humans-in-space/.

In-text: (NASA 2022)

IEEE

[1] NASA, "Humans In Space - NASA," December 2, 2022. [Online]. Available: https://www.nasa.gov/humans-in-space/.

In-text: [1]

Harvard

NASA (2022) 'Humans In Space - NASA'. Available at: https://www.nasa.gov/humans-in-space/.

In-text: (NASA, 2022)

Vancouver

1. Humans In Space - NASA [Internet]. NASA; 2022. Available from: https://www.nasa.gov/humans-in-space/.

In-text: (1)

OSCOLA (4th edn)

'Humans In Space - NASA' [2022].

In-text: OSCOLA cites in footnotes, not inline — insert the reference below as a footnote.

ASA 7th Edition

NASA. 2022. "Humans In Space - NASA." https://www.nasa.gov/humans-in-space/

In-text: (NASA 2022)

Turabian (Author-Date)

NASA. 2022. "Humans In Space - NASA." https://www.nasa.gov/humans-in-space/.

In-text: (NASA 2022)

CSE (9th edn)

1. Humans In Space - NASA. NASA; December 2, 2022. https://www.nasa.gov/humans-in-space/

In-text: [1]

Common mistakes when citing a website

Citing the homepage instead of the page you used. If a claim came from a specific article or subpage, the URL in your reference needs to point there, not to the site's front page. A reader following your citation should land exactly where you did, not on a homepage that requires three more clicks to find the source.

Inventing a date the page doesn't have. Most styles have a real answer for undated content, and using it correctly is not a weaker citation than guessing a plausible-looking date sitting next to it. Guessing is the actual error here, not the missing date itself.

Assuming no byline means no author. A page with no named writer usually still has a responsible organization behind it: a news outlet, a government department, a university department. That organization is the author in most styles. Treating the source as anonymous is only correct when there's genuinely no organization to credit either, which is a rarer case than it seems from the page alone.

Adding a retrieval date out of habit. Older guidance asked for an access date on every web source, and plenty of students still add one to everything by default. Current guidance mostly reserves that for content likely to change, like a wiki entry or a live dashboard. Tacking a retrieval date onto a static news article or a stable reference page is outdated practice, not extra rigor, and it can read as a sign the writer is working from an old style guide.

Treating every URL as the same kind of source. A link doesn't automatically mean "website" in the citation sense. A PDF hosted online, a newspaper article published digitally, and an open-access journal article you happened to find through a URL rather than a DOI all have their own, more specific citation types. If what you're actually citing is a journal article, the journal article citation generator will usually get you a more precise, more verifiable reference than the generic website format.

When you don't have a URL at all

Some sources described loosely as "online" don't resolve to a stable public page: an article behind a library paywall, a PDF someone emailed you directly, an internal document with no public link. Manual entry is the right tool for these, not the URL lookup, since there's no page for a lookup to read in the first place. Enter what you can confirm about the source yourself and the formatting still comes out correct.

Frequently asked questions

Can I cite a website with no listed author?

Yes. If there's a responsible organization behind the page, use that as the author. If there's genuinely neither an author nor an organization, most styles have a specific convention for that case rather than leaving the author field blank.

Do I need to include a retrieval date?

Only for content likely to change over time. A published news article or a static reference page generally doesn't need one under current guidance, even though older style advice asked for it on everything.

Is citing a website really free?

Yes. Single citations don't require an account at all. An account raises the daily limit for batch formatting and adds a Word export, which matters once you're working through a whole reference list rather than one source.

Try it

Paste your URL into the generator below and get the reference in all ten supported styles at once, including the in-text version for each. Switching styles afterward doesn't re-run anything, since the source details are already confirmed and only the formatting changes. The full MakeCitation generator also handles books by ISBN and journal articles by DOI, in case this page isn't quite what you're citing.

Style

Paste a DOI, ISBN, or URL

✓Verified metadata from Crossref & OpenLibrary — we never fabricate sources.

Not sure what to paste? See how to cite a website, book, or journal article.

Preview

Reference

Morozov, D., & Jensen, O. (2024). Biochar application for heavy metal immobilization in contaminated industrial soils. Journal of Soil Remediation, 18, 100412. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jsr.2023.100412

In-text

(Morozov & Jensen, 2024)