What exactly is Website citation and How to Cite a Website?
Whenever you use information from other websites on your own site, blog or publications, you have to give credit to the original author and website. Giving credit where it belongs can arrest plagiarism, get you clean image and save you from potential legal proceedings.
You may use the following simple steps to cite a website:
Explanation on How to Cite a Website
- Author: Find out the author’s name from the website. This can be found out from the article header, the about page or using the contact page of the website. If you do not get the actual author, you may want to use the site owners name. The name should be used in Last name, First name initial format (e.g Clinton, B)
- Year of publication: This is usually found below the article title on most websites or somewhere within the news body on news sites. For citing, you have to enclose the year of publication in parentheses and placed immediately after the author’s name
- Article title: Use of the news or article title with its first letter capitalized and it should end with a period. This information will follow the year of publication
- Date of accessing the information: Precede the date with the word “Retrieved” and succeed it with “from” (e.g Retrieved, December 23, 2010 from)
- Website name and URL: Get the website name as appeared on your web browser while browsing that site and the URL from the address box of the browser while browsing the article being cited. You may now complete the citation by including these information as the last part with the words “web site” following the website name
The completed website citation would look like the following example if you were to cite this particular website and the article that you are reading right now.
Lewis, B (2010) How to cite a website. Retrieved, December 23, 2010 from Daily Tips for Your Life web site https://dailytipsblog.com/how-to-cite-a-website.html
The above citation would work for printed material as well. When you are using online citation, you may shorten it further by actually linking the URL within the citation content.
What you just read is an example of APA style citation.
Now do yo still wonder how to cite a website?