PHP User Registration Tutorial: From Basics to Practical Code Examples

M66 2025-06-22

How to Implement User Registration Using PHP

With the growth of the internet, user registration features have become essential for almost all websites and applications. PHP, as a widely-used scripting language for web development, offers convenient tools and functions that make implementing user registration simple and efficient. This article will guide you through creating a basic user registration feature with PHP, including specific code examples.

Creating the User Registration Page

First, we need to build a user registration page where users can input their username, password, and email, then submit the data to the server for processing. Here is a simple HTML example for the registration page:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
    <title>User Registration</title>
</head>
<body>
    <h1>User Registration</h1>
    <form action="register.php" method="post">
        <label>Username:</label>
        <input type="text" name="username" required/><br>
    <input type="password" name="password" required/><br>

    <label>Email:</label>
    <input type="email" name="email" required/><br>

    <input type="submit" value="Register"/>
</form>

In this page, we use the

tag to submit user inputs using the POST method to the register.php script. Each input's name attribute identifies the data keys.

Writing the Backend Registration Handler

Next, create register.php to receive and save the submitted data into the database. Here is the example code:

<?php
// Connect to the database
$servername = "localhost";
$username = "root";
$password = "";
$dbname = "mydatabase";
<p>$conn = new mysqli($servername, $username, $password, $dbname);</p>
<p>if ($conn->connect_error) {<br>
die("Database connection failed: " . $conn->connect_error);<br>
}</p>
<p>// Retrieve submitted data<br>
$username = $_POST['username'];<br>
$password = $_POST['password'];<br>
$email = $_POST['email'];</p>
<p>// Insert data into the database<br>
$sql = "INSERT INTO users (username, password, email) VALUES ('$username', '$password', '$email')";</p>
<p>if ($conn->query($sql) === TRUE) {<br>
echo "Registration successful!";<br>
} else {<br>
echo "Registration failed: " . $conn->error;<br>
}</p>
<p>// Close database connection<br>
$conn->close();<br>
?><br>

This code demonstrates connecting to a database with mysqli and performing an insert operation. Be sure to update the connection parameters according to your environment. We use $_POST to get user inputs and insert them into the users table.

Important Notes and Security Tips

The example does not include validation or security measures. In real projects, you should check if the username already exists, enforce password length and strength requirements, and verify email format. Also, always sanitize and escape inputs to prevent SQL injection. Passwords should never be stored in plain text; instead, use hashing functions such as password_hash to improve security.

Conclusion

This article showed how to implement a basic user registration feature with PHP through practical examples. Once you understand these steps, you can extend and enhance the functionality according to your project needs to build a more secure and reliable registration system.