Let’s be honest: PHP 7.1.3 is old (released March 2017). It’s no longer supported, and you shouldn’t use it for production. But in the real world, legacy projects happen.
Fix these common pain points:
XAMPP is a popular, free, and open-source web development stack that includes Apache, MySQL, PHP, and Perl. Here's how to install XAMPP with PHP 7.1.3: xampp php 7.1.3
PHP 7.1.3 is dramatically faster than PHP 5.6—up to twice the requests per second. Yet it avoids the major backward-compatibility breaks introduced in PHP 7.4+ (like preloading) or PHP 8.0+ (named arguments, attributes). For conservative teams, it’s the sweet spot. Let’s be honest: PHP 7