How to Reference a Website in Harvard Style

A practical guide for students · Last updated 19 October 2026

Harvard referencing has no single official rulebook — UK universities each publish their own house version, which is why the format you were taught can look slightly different from a friend's at another university. The structure below follows the convention nearly all of them share. If your department has its own style guide, that always takes precedence.

In-text citation

Give the author's surname and the year, inside the sentence or in brackets at the end:

Research shows citation accuracy declines under time pressure (Walsh, 2022).

Walsh (2022) found that citation accuracy declines under time pressure.

Quoting directly? Add the page number: (Walsh, 2022, p. 14). Most websites don't have page numbers — in that case, the year alone is enough.

Reference list entry

The full entry goes in your alphabetised reference list at the end of your essay, in this order:

Author/Organisation (Year) Title of page. Available at: URL (Accessed: date).

A worked example:

NHS (2024) Five steps to mental wellbeing. Available at: https://www.nhs.uk/mental-health/self-help/guides-tools-and-activities/five-steps-to-mental-wellbeing/ (Accessed: 3 March 2026).

Handling the awkward cases

No individual author? Use the organisation that published the page — "NHS", "World Health Organization" — instead of leaving it blank.
No date on the page? Use (n.d.) in place of the year, both in-text and in the reference list.
The page has clearly been updated since you first found it? Use the most recent update date shown on the page, not the date the site originally launched.
Always include an accessed date. Unlike a published paper, a web page can change or disappear — the accessed date is how a marker knows what you actually saw.

Mistakes that actually cost marks

Citing a source in-text that never appears in the reference list (or vice versa) — markers check this, and it reads as a fabricated or sloppy citation either way.
Linking to a homepage instead of the specific page you used.
Leaving out the accessed date entirely.
Treating a source with no named author as unusable, rather than citing the organisation behind it.

This is exactly what LitMark's Citation Check verifies automatically — it checks every citation in your essay against the real source and flags anything missing, mismatched or fabricated before you submit. See how it works.

The honest takeaway: Harvard referencing rewards consistency more than any single rule. Pick your university's exact format, apply it the same way to every source, and the awkward cases above stop being awkward.

← Back to LitMark