Website Citation Generator
Paste any web page address below. Citation[Z] reads the page's own metadata — author, title, site name, and publication date — and builds the citation in all five major styles at once.
Web sources are the most-cited and most-botched source type: pages hide their authors, bury their dates, and rename themselves. The generator finds what's there and applies the correct per-style fallback for whatever is missing.
Paste any web page address
The same web page in every style
Alvarez, M. (2024, March 18). How memory consolidation works during sleep. Science Daily. https://www.sciencedaily.com/memory-consolidation-sleep
Alvarez, Maria. "How memory consolidation works during sleep." Science Daily, 18 Mar. 2024, https://www.sciencedaily.com/memory-consolidation-sleep. Accessed 1 June 2026.
Alvarez, Maria. "How memory consolidation works during sleep." Science Daily. March 18, 2024. https://www.sciencedaily.com/memory-consolidation-sleep.
Alvarez, M. (2024) How memory consolidation works during sleep. Available at: https://www.sciencedaily.com/memory-consolidation-sleep (Accessed: 1 June 2026).
M. Alvarez, "How memory consolidation works during sleep," Science Daily. https://www.sciencedaily.com/memory-consolidation-sleep (accessed June 1, 2026).
What we detect automatically
- Author — from the page's byline metadata; personal names are inverted per style, organizations kept whole.
- Title — the page's actual headline, not the browser-tab clutter.
- Site name — the publication, not the domain (e.g., Science Daily, not sciencedaily.com).
- Publish date — from article metadata, formatted per style (APA: 2024, March 18; MLA: 18 Mar. 2024).
- Access date — added automatically where the style requires or recommends it.
When the page is missing pieces
Each style has its own fallback rules, and the generator applies them automatically. No author? APA and MLA move the title into the author slot. No date? APA shows (n.d.), Harvard shows (no date), MLA leans on the access date. No site name? The domain is cleaned up and used. Anything detected wrong — say, a site that lists its CMS as the author — takes one click of Edit to fix.
Cite the page, not the homepage
The most common website citation mistake isn't formatting — it's citing example.com when you used example.com/specific-study. Graders and reviewers click links. Always paste the exact URL of the page you read; the generator keeps the full path in the citation.
Keep every citation you make.
A free account saves your citation history and organizes sources into projects with notes and tags.
Create a free account →Find the sources you should be citing.
Premium searches 250 million scholarly works by topic, recommends citations for your claims, and flags statements in your writing that need support.
Go Premium — $5/monthFrequently asked questions
- Can I cite a page behind a login or paywall?
- Yes — cite it like any web page (paste the URL; fill in details manually if we can't read the page). Readers with access can still resolve it, and the citation documents your source either way.
- Do all styles require an access date for websites?
- No. Harvard requires it, MLA recommends it, APA only wants it for content designed to change, IEEE includes it parenthetically. The generator follows each style's own rule.
- How do I cite a whole website rather than one page?
- Usually you shouldn't — cite the specific pages you used. If you genuinely need to reference an entire site, APA allows mentioning it in text with the URL, no reference entry needed.
- What about social media posts or videos?
- Use Manual Entry with the website type — author is the account or channel name, container is the platform. See our YouTube guide for the video pattern.