How to Cite a Website in MLA In-Text
Most people get confused between the works cited entry and the actual parenthetical citation. They're two different things, and getting them mixed up is why your papers keep looking wrong. The in-text citation is the brief pointer in your paragraph; the works cited entry is the full record at the end. Here is how you do it right. The standard format for a website in MLA 8th and 9th edition is straightforward, but the edge cases are where things fall apart. For a single author, you put the author's last name and the page number if there is one. Websites usually don't have page numbers, so it simplifies to just (Smith). If the author is a corporate organization, you use the short name of that organization. So (Pew Research Center). If there is no author at all, you use a shortened version of the title in quotation marks or italics depending on what the source is. I spent three hours once trying to figure out why my professor marked down every single citation from a news site. The problem was that the website listed a journalist byline, but below that it also had an editorial board listed as the "publisher." I kept using the editorial board name because it appeared first under the "About" section. It was wrong. The journalist is the author. The publication is the container. I had to go back and redo all fourteen citations. The workaround was simple once I understood it: always look at the byline, not the masthead or footer. If there is a person's name attached to the article, that is your author. Period.
For websites with multiple authors, you list both last names the first time you cite, then just the first author's last name after that. So the first citation might look like (Johnson and Lee 12), and a later one would just be (Johnson 15). When you use a paraphrase rather than a direct quote, the page number is still recommended if the site has them, but most academic sites won't penalize you for omitting it on a web source since pagination does not apply in a traditional sense. Here is a counter-intuitive point that catches a lot of people off guard. If the author and the container are the same thing, you do not repeat the name in the works cited entry. This matters for sites like Wikipedia, the CDC, or the APA itself. On Wikipedia, the author is listed as "Wikipedia" and the container is also "Wikipedia." MLA says to omit the container element when it is identical to the author. You still cite it as (Wikipedia) in-text though. The rule sounds obvious but I have seen students write "Wikipedia" twice in their works cited and then wonder why their citation looked bloated. Another nuance that beginners miss involves DOIs and URLs. MLA 9th edition prefers DOIs when they are available. If a website gives you both a DOI and a URL, use the DOI. If not, provide the full URL without "http://" or "https://". Do not shorten it with a link shortener. Do not truncate it. Just paste the whole thing. I once had a student who used a bit.ly link because the URL was absurdly long from a database. The professor flagged it immediately because shortened links are unverifiable. That is an easy point to lose.
When you are citing a specific part of a webpage, such as a graph or a table embedded in an article, MLA allows you to reference that specifically. You can say something like (Johnson, fig. 2) or (CDC, table 1). This is useful when your argument hinges on a visual element rather than the text itself. Most students never use this and just cite the whole page, which is fine but less precise. One more practical thing. If you are citing a video or audio embedded on a website, the website is still the container. The author might be the uploader, and the title of the video goes in quotation marks, while the website name is italicized. So the in-text citation would still just be the author's last name. It sounds trivial but the format changes depending on whether the content is a standalone webpage or media embedded on one. If your source is a social media post, MLA treats it differently. You include the handle as the author, the text of the post in quotation marks, the platform name as the container, the date, and the URL or permalink. The in-text citation for a tweet would be (handle). For an Instagram post, same idea. This is often where students struggle the most because social media citations feel informal, but the rules are just as strict.
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Finally, a quick note on punctuation inside the parenthetical citation. The period always goes after the closing parenthesis, never before it. So your sentence should read: The study showed significant correlation (Johnson 45). Not: The study showed significant correlation. (Johnson 45). This is one of the most common errors I see, and it is also one of the easiest to fix with a quick spell-check pass.
