A webpage in APA 7 is built from four elements — author, date, title and source — and most student errors come from treating one of them the way an older edition, or another style entirely, would treat it. APA 7 dropped the words “Retrieved from” before ordinary URLs, dropped the full stop after a URL, and narrowed retrieval dates to a small class of pages designed to change. It also asks for the page title in italics, the site name in ordinary title case, and the most specific date the page genuinely offers. This guide works through the standard webpage, organisation-authored pages, news sites, blogs — where the italics reverse in a way that catches everyone once — pages with no date or no author, and the one situation where a retrieval date is still required. The rules below follow the APA Style guidance published by the American Psychological Association. To build references automatically, use the APA Referencing Generator, and see the APA referencing guide for the full system; companion pages cover how to reference a journal article in APA and the same task in another style, how to reference a website in Harvard style.
The basic webpage format
The standard APA 7 reference for a webpage on a website runs:
Author, A. A. (Year, Month Day). Title of the webpage. Site Name. https://www.example.com/the-page
Take the elements in order. The author is a person (surname, then initials) or an organisation, exactly as for any APA source. The date is the most specific one the page itself carries — year alone if that is all there is, year and month, or the full year, month and day for frequently updated material such as news. The title of the specific page is italicised and written in sentence case: capitalise the first word, the first word after a colon, and proper nouns, nothing else. The site name follows in title case, not italicised. The reference ends with the page’s full URL, with no full stop after it — a full stop would corrupt the link if copied. A real example:
Hargreaves, T. (2025, April 14). Helping teenagers sleep during exam season. Family Wellbeing Trust. https://www.familywellbeingtrust.org.uk/advice/teen-sleep-exams
Note what is absent: no “Retrieved from”, no access date, no publisher. APA 7 reserves the webpage format for pages that belong to no other category — if the thing you found online is really a journal article, a report, a book or a newspaper piece, it takes that category’s format instead, wherever you happened to read it.
Organisation authors, and when the site name disappears
Most webpages students cite are written by organisations rather than named people: charities, health bodies, government departments, universities. The organisation goes in the author position, spelled out in full:
Shelter Housing Advice. (2026). Rent arrears: what your landlord must do first. https://www.shelterhousingadvice.org.uk/rent-arrears
Look at what happened to the site name: it is gone. The APA rule is that when the author and the site name are the same, the site name is omitted from the source element, because repeating “Shelter Housing Advice” twice in one short reference adds nothing. The omission confuses students into thinking the reference is unfinished; it is not — it is the style working as designed. Where a named individual writes on an organisation’s site, by contrast, both appear, as in the Hargreaves example above: person as author, organisation’s site as the site name.
News sites: full dates, and a boundary to watch
Articles on news websites — sites that publish news continuously and exist only online — are referenced as webpages, with the fullest date because news is dated to the day:
Osei, K. (2026, October 30). Council approves new cycle lanes for city centre. Northgate News. https://www.northgatenews.co.uk/city/cycle-lanes-approved
The boundary to watch is the online newspaper: a site that is the digital edition of a print newspaper is treated in APA as a periodical, and its articles take the newspaper article format, with the article title in plain text and the newspaper’s name italicised. The distinction is about what the publication is, not how it looks on your screen. If the outlet has a print edition with the same name, use the periodical format; if it is web-only news, the webpage format above is correct.
Blog posts: the italics reverse
Blog posts are the webpage variant that catches students out, because APA treats a blog like a periodical rather than like a website. The post’s title is therefore written in plain text, not italics, and it is the blog’s name that is italicised — the exact reverse of the standard webpage:
Whitfield, R. (2025, September 2). What I got wrong about revision timetables. The Study Desk. https://www.thestudydesk.blog/revision-timetables
The logic, once seen, is consistent: within APA, the part you read takes italics when it is a standalone work (a webpage, a book, a report), and the container takes italics when the part is one contribution among many (an article in a journal, a post in a blog, a chapter in a book). Remembering that single principle settles the italics question for every source type, not just blogs. Blog posts take a full date, as the Whitfield example shows, because they are published on a specific day like other periodical contributions.
Pages designed to change: when a retrieval date IS required
APA 7 removed the routine retrieval date, but kept it for one defined case: content that is designed to change over time and is not archived, where a reader following your URL later would find different material from what you saw. Live dashboards, social media profile pages, continuously updated reference pages and unarchived data displays are the standard examples. For those, and only those, the retrieval date returns, in this form:
Regional Transport Data Service. (n.d.). Live bus departure performance by route. Retrieved November 2, 2026, from https://www.rtds-data.org.uk/live-performance
The test to apply is two-part: is the page meant to change, and is there no archived version to cite instead? If a page keeps a stable history — Wikipedia is the classic case — cite the archived version of the page you used, with that version’s date and its permanent URL, and no retrieval date is needed. Slapping “Retrieved [date] from” on every website reference is the single most common APA 7 website error, a habit carried over from APA 6 teaching materials that still circulate. If the page is a fixed article or fact sheet, the retrieval date is simply wrong, however careful it looks.
No date, no author: the fallback rules
Webpages routinely lack elements, and APA has a settled answer for each gap. No date: write (n.d.) — “no date” — in the date position, in the reference and in the text: (Shelter Housing Advice, n.d.). Do not substitute the copyright year from the website’s footer; that date describes the site, not the page, and the APA guidance is explicit that it does not count. If a page carries a “last updated” date, that update date is the date to use, since it dates the version you read; a “last reviewed” date does not, because review does not change content.
No author: if no person and no organisation can be identified as responsible for the page, the title moves into the author position, still italicised:
Understanding your council tax band. (2025). Bexley Borough Council Services. https://www.bexleyboroughservices.org.uk/council-tax/bands
In the text, cite a shortened form of the title in quotation marks: (“Understanding Your Council Tax Band,” 2025). Before using the fallback, though, look properly — most apparently authorless pages belong to the organisation whose site hosts them, and that organisation is the author, which returns you to the group-author format above.
In-text citations for webpages
In-text forms follow the ordinary APA pattern. Parenthetical: (Hargreaves, 2025). Narrative: Hargreaves (2025) suggests that… For a direct quotation from a webpage, add the paragraph number where the page has no page numbers — (Hargreaves, 2025, para. 4) — counting paragraphs from the top of the page. Organisation authors are spelled out in full at first citation; a well-known organisation with a standard abbreviation may be introduced with the abbreviation in square brackets — (National Sleep Foundation [NSF], 2025) — and cited as (NSF, 2025) thereafter. One caution: if you merely mention a website in general — “the data were downloaded from the council’s website (https://…)” — APA wants no reference list entry at all; the name and URL in the text are the whole citation. Reference entries are for specific pages whose content you used.
Referencing support while you finish the assignment
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Frequently asked questions
Do I need a retrieval date for every website in APA 7? No — only for pages designed to change over time that are not archived, such as live dashboards or profile pages. For ordinary articles and fact sheets, APA 7 dropped retrieval dates entirely.
Why is there no site name in some of my webpage references? Because the author and the site name are the same organisation. APA omits the site name in that case to avoid repeating it; the reference is complete without it.
Is a blog post title italicised in APA 7? No. The post title is plain, and the blog’s name is italicised — blogs are treated like periodicals, so the container takes the italics.
What date do I use if the page only shows a copyright year in the footer? None. A site-wide footer copyright date does not date the page. Use a publication or last-updated date attached to the content itself, or write (n.d.).
Do I write “Retrieved from” before the URL? Only in the retrieval-date case, as part of “Retrieved Month Day, Year, from”. For all other webpages the URL simply follows the site name, with no label and no full stop after it.
How do I cite a webpage with no author in the text? Use a shortened version of the page title in double quotation marks with the year: (“Understanding Your Council Tax Band,” 2025). In the reference list, the full title stands in the author position.