What are some best practices for maintaining code efficiency and security when developing PHP websites?

Issue: One best practice for maintaining code efficiency and security when developing PHP websites is to sanitize user input to prevent SQL injection attacks. This can be done by using prepared statements with parameterized queries. Code snippet: 

// Establish a database connection
$pdo = new PDO('mysql:host=localhost;dbname=mydatabase', 'username', 'password');

// Sanitize user input
$user_input = $_POST['user_input'];
$stmt = $pdo->prepare('SELECT * FROM users WHERE username = :username');
$stmt->bindParam(':username', $user_input);
$stmt->execute();

Keywords

SQL injection XSS prevention input validation secure coding practices performance optimization

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