What best practices should be followed when designing a homepage for a news system using PHP and MySQL?

When designing a homepage for a news system using PHP and MySQL, it is important to follow best practices to ensure the site is efficient, secure, and user-friendly. This includes properly sanitizing user input to prevent SQL injection attacks, using prepared statements to interact with the database, and optimizing queries for performance.

<?php
// Connect to MySQL database
$servername = "localhost";
$username = "username";
$password = "password";
$dbname = "news_database";

$conn = new mysqli($servername, $username, $password, $dbname);

// Check connection
if ($conn->connect_error) {
    die("Connection failed: " . $conn->connect_error);
}

// Retrieve news articles from database
$sql = "SELECT * FROM news_articles ORDER BY date_published DESC LIMIT 10";
$result = $conn->query($sql);

if ($result->num_rows > 0) {
    // Output data of each row
    while($row = $result->fetch_assoc()) {
        echo "Title: " . $row["title"]. " - Content: " . $row["content"]. "<br>";
    }
} else {
    echo "0 results";
}

$conn->close();
?>