What are some common mistakes made by beginners when customizing PHP scripts for online marketing purposes?

One common mistake made by beginners when customizing PHP scripts for online marketing purposes is not properly sanitizing user input, which can leave the website vulnerable to security attacks such as SQL injection. To solve this issue, always use prepared statements or escaping functions when interacting with a database to prevent malicious code from being executed.

// Example of using prepared statements to sanitize user input
$stmt = $pdo->prepare('SELECT * FROM users WHERE username = :username');
$stmt->bindParam(':username', $username);
$stmt->execute();