Citing a website in APA is the case students get wrong most often, because a web page rarely gives you the four things APA wants in the order APA wants them. This page shows the pattern for APA 7th edition, what to do when the author or the date is missing, and when a retrieval date genuinely belongs in the reference.
APA 7 builds a web reference from four elements in a fixed order: author, date, title, source. The difficulty is that web pages often supply only two of them, and the rules for what to do about the missing ones are what this page is really about.
A web source is cited in text exactly like any other APA source: author and year. The complication is what to do when you quote directly from a page that has no page numbers, which is most web pages.
Paraphrase: (World Health Organization, 2024)
Direct quote, page has headings: (World Health Organization, 2024, Air quality section)
Direct quote, no headings: (Okafor, n.d., para. 4)
Organisation named in the sentence: World Health Organization (2024) reported that...
Organisation as author, with a date
World Health Organization. (2024, March 11). Air quality and health. https://www.who.int/example
Named author, no date
Okafor, N. (n.d.). Why sleep debt compounds. Sleep Science Review. https://example.com/sleep-debt
Page that changes, so a retrieval date is added
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. (n.d.). Consumer price index summary. Retrieved August 20, 2026, from https://www.bls.gov/example
Most of the difficulty with web references is not the standard pattern but the cases that fall outside it. These are the ones that come up in real coursework.
| The page is a PDF hosted on a website | Cite it as the document it is. A report keeps its report number and the issuing body as author, and the URL points at the PDF. |
|---|---|
| The author is an individual writing for an organisation | Use the individual as author if their name appears on the page, and the organisation as the site name. |
| The site name repeats the author | Drop the site name. Do not write World Health Organization twice in one reference. |
| You are citing the site as a whole | Mention it in your text with the URL in parentheses and give no reference entry at all. |
| The page is behind a login | Cite it normally but check whether your reader can reach it. If not, describe the access restriction in the text. |
| The content moved or disappeared | Cite the archived copy from the Internet Archive with the original date, which is far better than a dead link. |
Under APA 6, a retrieval date went on nearly every web reference. APA 7 reversed that, and the change is the source of most of the confusion still visible in submitted work. The current rule is narrow: include a retrieval date only when the content at that URL is designed to change and there is no archived version a reader could go back to.
The test is whether a reader following your link next month would see something different from what you saw. A news article published on a date does not change, so no retrieval date. A live unemployment statistics page, a wiki entry, a social media profile and a Google Maps view all change, so a retrieval date belongs on each of them.
There is a practical reason behind the rule rather than a stylistic one. A retrieval date on a fixed page adds noise without adding information, because the publication date already tells the reader which version exists. On a changing page it is the only thing that pins down what you actually read, which is why APA kept it for exactly those cases.
Move the title into the author position and follow it with the date. If an organisation is responsible for the page, use the organisation as the author instead, which is the more common case for government and institutional pages.
Use (n.d.) in the date position, and use (n.d.) in the in-text citation too: (World Health Organization, n.d.). A page with no date is also the situation where a retrieval date becomes useful.
Yes, as a live https:// link to the specific page rather than the site home page. Do not shorten it, and do not add Retrieved from in front of it.
Author and year, as with any other source: (World Health Organization, 2024). If you quote directly and the page has no page numbers, cite the paragraph or the heading instead.
No. APA describes the source, not the device you read it on. The same is true for print versus PDF versions of the same document when the content is identical.
Start with the title and treat the site as the source. If even the site is unclear, that is usually a signal the page is not a source worth citing in academic work.