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you would have been getting php errors at the reference to the connection variable. php's error_reporting should always be set to E_ALL. when learning, developing, and debugging code/query(ies), display_errors should be set to ON. when on a live/public server, display_errors should be set to OFF, and log_errors should be set to ON.

what output are you getting on the web page? if it's a blank page, what does the 'view source' in your browser show? can you echo a string using php code? is your code doing any redirects that could discard any output from the web page if php's output_buffering is ON? do you have php's error_reporting set to E_ALL and display_errors set to ON, preferably in the php.ini on your system, so that php will help you by reporting and displaying all the errors it detects? stop and start your web server to get any changes made to the php.ini to take effect and check that the settings actually got changed to those values by using a phpinfo(); statement in a .php script file. do you have error handling for all the database statements that can fail - connection, query, prepare, execute, and a few others? the simplest way of adding error handling, without adding conditional logic at each statement, is to use exceptions for errors and in most cases simply let php catch and handle the exception, where php will use its error related settings (see the previous paragraph above) to control what happens with the actual error information (database statement errors will 'automatically' get displayed/logged the same as php errors.) to enable exceptions for errors for the mysqli extension, add the following line of code before the point where you make the database connection - mysqli_report(MYSQLI_REPORT_ERROR | MYSQLI_REPORT_STRICT);

sleep() , perchance to dream.