How to cite a website with no author or no date

Most citation guides assume a source with an author, a date, a title and a publisher. Real web pages routinely have two of those. An NHS advice page, a company help article, a government statistics page — none of them names a person, and half of them never say when they were written.

Every major style handles this the same way in principle: when an element is missing, the next one moves up to take its place. The confusion is almost never about the reference list. It is about what you then write in the sentence.

No author

The title moves into the author position. You do not write “Anonymous”, and you do not use the website’s web address as the author.

Two details in that in-text form catch people out, and both are APA-specific:

• The title is in quotation marks because it is part of a larger work (a page on a site). A standalone whole work — a whole book, a whole report — is italicised instead.
• The in-text title is in title case, even though the reference list entry is in sentence case. This looks like an inconsistency and is not one; APA genuinely uses different capitalisation in the two positions.

You may also shorten a long title in text. “Understanding blood pressure readings and what the numbers actually mean” becomes (“Understanding Blood Pressure,” 2024).

MLA is simpler here: title case throughout, quotation marks for a page, no year in the in-text citation at all.

When there is a corporate author

Before you decide there is no author, check whether there is an organisational one. A page published by the World Health Organization has an author: the World Health Organization. This is the single most common mistake in this whole area — students treat “no person’s name” as “no author” and move the title up unnecessarily.

Look in the footer, the “about” page, and the page’s own metadata. If the site is by an organisation and the page is not signed by an individual, the organisation is the author.

No date

Use n.d. — “no date” — in the date position.

MLA takes a different view: it simply omits the date rather than marking its absence, and instead encourages an access date at the end when the source is undated or likely to change.

What does not count as a date

A copyright line reading ”© 2026” is a site-wide copyright notice, not a publication date for that page, and using it is a common way to end up citing a 2011 article as 2026. The same goes for “Last reviewed” banners on some sites, though those are usually closer to the truth than nothing.

If the page genuinely shows a “last updated” or “reviewed” date for that specific content, that is a legitimate date to use.

Neither an author nor a date

Both rules apply at once. The title moves up, and n.d. fills the date.

At this point it is worth pausing. A page with no author, no date and no named publisher is a source with no accountability at all. It may still be the right source — a technical reference, a piece of documentation — but if it is carrying an argument in your essay, that is a marking risk quite separate from the citation.

Harvard

Harvard is not a single style. Your institution’s guide is the specification, and they differ on exactly this point: some use Anon. in the author position, most now prefer the title, and the date is usually (no date) written out rather than n.d.

Check your library guide before submitting. This is one of the few places where different Harvard variants genuinely disagree.

A quick decision table

Before you cite it at all

Two checks worth thirty seconds:

Look for a byline that is not at the top. Many sites put the author at the foot of the article, or in a “reviewed by” line under a heading, or only in the page’s underlying data.

Check the archived version. If a page has no date, the Internet Archive often shows when it first appeared. That is not a publication date and should not be cited as one, but it will tell you whether you are citing something from last year or from 2009.

Putting it together

Once you know which element is missing, the mechanical part — the italics, the stop placement, the order — is what a generator is for. Our citation generator has a website source type that leaves the author and date fields optional and applies these rules for you, in all four styles.

One caution that applies to every generator including ours: automatic sentence case cannot reliably tell a proper noun from an ordinary word. “British Heart Foundation” survives; a less common name may not. Read your finished references and check the capitals.

If you are also checking the length of what you have written, the character and word counter will tell you where you stand against a word limit, and states which counting convention it uses — because your marker’s tool and yours may not agree.