To make an in-text citation for a website, you need the author’s last name and either a year or a page number, depending on your citation style. The three most common styles, APA, MLA, and Chicago, each handle website citations slightly differently, but they all follow the same basic logic: give the reader enough information inside your sentence to find the full source on your references page.
Websites create a few wrinkles that books don’t. They often lack page numbers, sometimes list an organization instead of a person as the author, and occasionally have no author or date at all. Here’s how to handle each situation in the style you’re using.
APA Style (Author-Date Method)
APA uses the author’s last name and the year of publication. You can place both inside parentheses at the end of a sentence, or weave the author’s name into your sentence and put just the year in parentheses.
Parenthetical citation: Place the author and year after the quoted or paraphrased material.
- Remote work has increased employee satisfaction across several industries (Smith, 2023).
Narrative citation: Use the author’s name as part of your sentence and put the year right after it in parentheses.
- Smith (2023) found that remote work has increased employee satisfaction across several industries.
If you’re quoting exact words from a website, APA asks you to point the reader to where on the page you found the quote. Since most websites don’t have page numbers, use another locator: a paragraph number, section heading, or similar marker. For example: (Smith, 2023, para. 4). When you’re paraphrasing rather than quoting directly, you can drop the locator and just use the author and year.
MLA Style (Author-Page Method)
MLA pairs the author’s last name with a page number. For websites, there’s usually no page number, so the citation is often just the author’s last name in parentheses.
- Remote work has reshaped hiring practices nationwide (Smith).
If you mention the author’s name in your sentence, you don’t need a parenthetical citation at all:
- Smith reports that remote work has reshaped hiring practices nationwide.
When the website has no named author, use a shortened version of the article or page title instead. Short works like articles and web pages get quotation marks; longer works like entire websites get italics. Shorten longer titles to a noun phrase by dropping articles like “a,” “an,” or “the” from the beginning.
- Hiring trends shifted dramatically in the past three years (“Remote Work Trends”).
Chicago Style (Author-Date Method)
Chicago’s author-date system looks similar to APA: the author’s last name and the year, placed in parentheses.
- Remote work has reshaped hiring across multiple sectors (Smith 2023).
Notice that Chicago does not use a comma between the author and year, while APA does. That small difference matters if your instructor is checking formatting closely.
Chicago also allows you to describe website content informally within your text without a formal citation, especially for well-known web pages. For example: “As of June 2024, Google’s privacy policy stated…” is acceptable in Chicago style when a formal parenthetical would feel forced. If your assignment requires formal citations for every source, though, stick with the parenthetical format.
When There’s No Author Listed
Many web pages list an organization rather than an individual author. Government agencies, universities, and companies frequently publish content this way. In that case, the organization’s name takes the author’s place.
- APA: (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2024)
- MLA: (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention)
- Chicago: (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 2024)
If there is truly no author and no organization attached to the content, use the title of the page in place of the author name. In APA and Chicago, use the first few words of the title along with the year. In MLA, use a shortened title in quotation marks (for an article or page) or italics (for an entire site). Do not write “Anonymous” as the author unless the source itself is literally signed “Anonymous.”
When There’s No Date
Websites sometimes lack a clear publication or update date. APA and Chicago handle this with the abbreviation “n.d.” (for “no date”) in place of the year.
- APA: (Smith, n.d.)
- Chicago: (Smith n.d.)
If both the author and date are missing, combine the rules: use the title in place of the author and “n.d.” in place of the year. An APA citation might look like (“Remote Work Trends,” n.d.), while a Chicago citation would drop the comma: (“Remote Work Trends” n.d.).
MLA doesn’t use dates in its in-text citations at all, so a missing date doesn’t change anything inside your parentheses. You’ll still handle it on the Works Cited page.
Quick Reference by Style
- APA: (Author, Year) or Author (Year). Add a paragraph number or section heading for direct quotes.
- MLA: (Author) or (Author Page). No page number needed if the website doesn’t have one. Use a shortened title if there’s no author.
- Chicago: (Author Year). No comma between author and year. Use “n.d.” when no date exists.
Whichever style you use, the in-text citation is only half the job. Every in-text citation needs a matching entry on your references page (called “References” in APA, “Works Cited” in MLA, or “Reference List” in Chicago author-date). The in-text citation tells your reader where the idea came from; the full entry gives them enough detail to find it themselves.