How can PHP developers effectively handle the insertion of HTML tags in a PHP template file?

When inserting HTML tags in a PHP template file, developers should use PHP's built-in functions like htmlspecialchars() to escape special characters and prevent XSS attacks. This function converts special characters like <, >, ", ', and & into their respective HTML entities, ensuring that the HTML tags are treated as plain text and not executed as code.

&lt;?php
$html_content = &quot;&lt;h1&gt;Welcome to our website&lt;/h1&gt;&quot;;
echo htmlspecialchars($html_content);
?&gt;