Citing a different APA source?
Switch to the full APA 7 Citation Generator to handle books, journal articles, videos, reports, and more in one place.
Paste any URL. Get a clean APA 7th edition reference for the page plus a matching in-text citation. Handles missing dates (n.d.), organization-as-author, and the rule for when a retrieval date belongs in the reference. Free, no signup.
Tip: Paste the page URL — we'll pull the title, author, and publication date automatically.
The basic shape is the same as any APA 7 reference: Author. (Date). Title. Site name. URL. Most of the trouble comes from filling in those slots when the website itself doesn't make them obvious. Who is the "author" when the byline says "BBC News Staff"? What date do you use when only the year is on the page? Does the URL get a "Retrieved from" in front of it? APA 7 rewrote a lot of the website rules in 2019, and the version most students learned in high school is the older APA 6 form. The generator handles the new rules; the section below covers the why.
World Health Organization. (2023, March 7). Mental health. https://www.who.int/health-topics/mental-health
(2023, March 7). If only a year is shown, use (2023). If no date appears anywhere, use (n.d.).APA's author-date rule still applies: (Author, Year). For an organization, spell it out the first time and abbreviate after if the abbreviation is well known: (World Health Organization [WHO], 2023) first, then (WHO, 2023). With no date: (WHO, n.d.). Direct quote from a webpage with no page numbers? Use a paragraph number or a section heading: (WHO, 2023, para. 4).
(World Health Organization, 2023)
This is the rule almost everyone gets wrong. APA 7 only requires "Retrieved [Date], from [URL]" when the page is designed to change over time and isn't archived. That covers wikis, dictionary entries that update, social media profiles, and live data dashboards. It does not cover normal news articles, blog posts, government pages, or anything dated. If the page has a date, the date is enough — readers can find that version of the article. Adding a retrieval date to a regular news article is an APA 6 holdover and a common mistake.
cnn.com.https:// link unless the publisher provides an official short URL.Paste a URL and we read the page's metadata — Open Graph tags, schema.org JSON-LD, and the standard <meta> author/date fields. That covers about 90% of news, blogs, and journal landing pages. If the page also has a DOI hidden in the source, we hit Crossref instead because that's the canonical record. The CSL engine then renders the reference in APA 7, applies sentence case to the title, picks n.d. when no date came back, and assembles the matching (Author, Year) in-text citation.
Move the page title into the author slot and italicize it: Title of page. (Year, Month Day). Site name. URL. In-text, use a shortened title in quotes: ("Climate Update," 2023). If the page is from an organization with no individual byline, use the organization as the author — that's the more common case.
Use (n.d.) in the date slot — that's APA's abbreviation for "no date." In-text it becomes (Author, n.d.). Many websites do publish dates that aren't immediately visible — check the article footer, the URL slug, or the page's HTML before falling back to n.d.
Only for pages designed to change — wikis, social-media profiles, dictionary entries, live data feeds. For regular dated articles, blog posts, news stories, and government pages, no retrieval date is needed. The published date is enough.
If the source is an article in an online news outlet or magazine, cite it as an article, not a webpage: italicize the publication name (not the title), and the format is Author. (Date). Title. Publication Name. URL. The generator picks the right template automatically — but if you're entering details by hand, switch to the "Magazine Article" or "News Article" source type for a journalism-style source.
Include the full URL as plain text in the reference list. APA 7 allows live hyperlinks if the document will be read online; either format is acceptable as long as you're consistent. Don't shorten the URL using bit.ly or similar — readers need the canonical link.
List up to 20 authors in the reference list, separated by commas, with an ampersand before the last: Smith, J., Doe, A., & Lee, K. In-text, two authors get an ampersand inside parentheses; three or more collapse to et al. from the first citation: (Smith et al., 2023).
Switch to the full APA 7 Citation Generator to handle books, journal articles, videos, reports, and more in one place.
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Run it through the AI Citation Checker to confirm the URL still resolves and the metadata matches what's on the page.
Our How to cite a website walkthrough covers every variant — wikis, social media, news, government pages — with examples.
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