One of the things I used to help make my PHP attempts go more smoothly was at least utilizing an existing template engine, such as
Twig. It was something that began my journey with a but of SQL attempts with a Splatoon like page where I wanted to put something up for rankings for myself for fun, see what I can pull off with a proper graphical system I could code in.
I didn't get far into that since it would be a lot of manual labor for any Splatoon related updates, and no one would really use it but myself anyway. If anything I got a good portion of my website styling to carry over from that project.
It was a valuable learning tool several years ago.