Mistakes you must avoid during the PHP development

by JONATHAN PAUL Jonathan Paul working at PHPProgrammers, a leading

Developers, both experienced and beginners, often make some common mistakes during PHP development. However, avoiding these mistakes is important to end up with flawless websites. Here’s an article about it shared by an expert of a leading PHP development company.

PHP is the most favoured open-source server-side scripting language for building web apps or dynamic web pages because of its robustness, multi-platform support, and other features and functionalities that make it easy to learn, understand and use. Yet, sometimes developers, both beginners and experienced ones often make some common mistakes while building a website with this language. And most of these errors or mistakes do not hinder the code functioning and are hence overlooked. However, these mistakes can cause issues and can even lead to security loopholes later on in the website or web app. Hence, avoiding these mistakes is important for every developer of every PHP development company.

And here are the most common mistakes you need to avoid. Go through them.

PHP is a robust programming language but still, there are some pitfalls most developers often tend to make and need to avoid to boost the efficiency of the development and improve the quality of the project.

Incorrect use of PHP operators:

This is a very common mistake developer often make while using the assignment ‘==’ sign instead of the comparison sign that is ‘==’. The wrong use of this can simply alter the value of variables. So, be careful while using PHP operators like this.

Forgetting to rewrite the URLs:

It is essential to write clean and easy-to-understand URLs as given in different PHP-based framework guides like that in Laravel, Zend, Symfony, etc. URLs with a lot of variables can make it difficult to understand and can create a mess in the URL structure, which may not be acceptable in modern practice.

Using MYSQL extensions:

This is outdated anyways and is not secure as well. Moreover, it does not support SSL. Instead, developers can now use MySQLi that is much faster, more reliable, and secure than MySQL.

Not using PDO:

PHP Data Objects allow the use of OOP syntax, which also align the codes for databases like PostgreSQL, and MySQL. It is a time-saving feature that enables the injection of fetched data into the objects directly and also allows the use of named parameter for easy development.

Forgetting to make use of Database Caching:

Caching helps to improve the performance of the websites and the databases, enhancing user experiences at the same time. Memcached, Redis, query cache, varnish, and a few more can be used for this.

Suppressing errors:

The display of errors makes things easier for the developers. It lets developers easily identify the errors and fix them then and there. Suppressing errors and then allowing the website to run along with the errors in it can hamper the website and its performance later on. Instead, developers must redirect the errors to the error log.

Using unvalidated user input:

Every data or input is sensitive. This makes the validation of every user input significant. Invalidated user input can be hacked easily, which can hamper the security factor of the site. Exploiting the database queries allows users to inject query strings, which can fetch all sensitive information from the database. Hence, validating user-entered info is mandatory.

Not using the in-built classes or functions:

PHP comes with many in-built classes and functions with some of the basic and common logic or tasks. Using these functions wherever you want to implement the same logic helps to maintain a quality code instead of just writing the same codes everywhere making them lengthy. Using these functions or classes can also enhance the performance of the website, with quality, short, and clean coding structure.

Being aware of these PHP web development mistakes can ensure better results with all errors addressed at the right time. Hence, a programmer must remember these points above and avoid the same while building a project with PHP, the most secure, intuitive, and feature-rich web development language.

Jonathan Paul is one of the most dedicated and experienced web developers associated with the top PHP development company in Australia, PHPProgrammers. The author has written this article to help developers and newbies identify some of the common mistakes and avoid the same for efficient PHP web development.