Harvard Website Citation Generator

How to cite a website in Harvard style

Harvard isn't a single style — it's a family of author-date styles used at universities across the UK, Australia, and parts of Europe. The most common variant is Cite Them Right, which is what most British universities mean by "Harvard." This page generates Cite Them Right Harvard. The basic shape: Author (Year) Title of page. Site name. Available at: URL (Accessed: Date). The two things that make Harvard distinct from APA: an explicit [Online] bracket and a required accessed date.

Example Harvard website reference

World Health Organization (2023) Mental health. Available at: https://www.who.int/health-topics/mental-health (Accessed: 12 May 2026).

The five building blocks

• Author — person if there's a byline (last name, initials), organization otherwise. No comma between name and year.
• Year — in parentheses, no comma after: (2023). If no date, use (no date) — Harvard spells it out, unlike APA's n.d.
• Title of page — italicized, sentence case (capitalize first word, proper nouns).
• "Available at:" — Harvard requires this exact prefix before the URL. The colon is part of the format.
• Accessed date — required for almost every Harvard web reference, in parenthetical: (Accessed: 12 May 2026). Day, month-spelled-out, year. The colon after "Accessed" is required.

In-text citation for a website

Harvard's standard in-text format: (Author, Year). Note the comma — that's different from the reference list, where there's no comma between author and year. Two authors: (Smith and Doe, 2023) with "and" rather than an ampersand. Three or more authors: (Smith et al., 2023). For a direct quote, add a page or paragraph reference: (Smith, 2023, p. 14), or for webpages without pages, (Smith, 2023, para. 4).

(World Health Organization, 2023)

Why Harvard requires an accessed date

This is the rule that surprises students who learned APA first. APA dropped retrieval/access dates for stable web pages in 2019. Harvard kept them — for almost everything. The reasoning: web pages can be edited or removed without notice, and the access date tells your reader exactly which version of the page you used. If the page is later updated or taken down, the access date proves you're not making things up. A few Harvard variants make the date optional, but Cite Them Right (the most common version) requires it for nearly all online sources.

Common Harvard website mistakes

• Don't omit "Available at:" before the URL. Harvard requires the exact prefix with the colon.
• Don't omit the accessed date. Required for almost all Harvard web references — even dated news articles.
• Don't put a comma between the author and year in the reference list. Harvard reference: Author (2023). Harvard in-text: (Author, 2023). The comma only appears in-text.
• Don't use "n.d." for missing dates. Harvard spells it out: (no date).
• Don't use the format MM/DD/YYYY for the accessed date. Harvard uses day-month-year, with the month spelled out: 12 May 2026.
• Don't shorten URLs with bit.ly. Use the full canonical URL so the reader can verify the source.

How the generator works

Paste a URL and we read the page metadata — Open Graph tags, schema.org JSON-LD, and standard <meta> author/date fields. The CSL engine renders Harvard Cite Them Right formatting: italicized sentence-case title, "Available at:" prefix, full URL, accessed date in parentheses. The matching (Author, Year) in-text citation comes alongside.