What are the potential pitfalls of using multiple LEFT JOIN statements in a MySQL query for PHP applications?

Using multiple LEFT JOIN statements in a MySQL query for PHP applications can lead to performance issues, especially when joining large tables. To mitigate this, it's recommended to carefully optimize the query by selecting only the necessary columns and adding appropriate indexes to the tables involved in the joins.

$query = "SELECT t1.column1, t2.column2 
          FROM table1 t1 
          LEFT JOIN table2 t2 ON t1.id = t2.id 
          LEFT JOIN table3 t3 ON t1.id = t3.id 
          WHERE t1.column3 = 'value'";