@robynobrien,
Sorry you’re having issues here. It’s kind of confusing (admittedly) but LifterLMS isn’t actually in charge of determining what version of PHP you’re running. We haven’t written any code that determines whether or not you can install or upgrade LifterLMS, WordPress takes care of this. The WordPress core added this in WordPress 5.1 (maybe it was 5.2 actually, I can’t remember, but it doesn’t really matter). WordPress used to not actually check whether or not the plugin/theme being installed/updated met the requirements put forth in our plugin meta data but now it does.
You can check what version WordPress is running on by navigating to the WordPress Site Health Check screen on your admin panel.
Head to Tools -> Site Health and then click the “Info” tab. Expand the “Server” section and you’ll see your PHP Version (again, as seen by WordPress) under “PHP Version”.
This is the version your server is running and if it’s showing a different version than you want/think/your host says you’re running you need to work with fixing that before you can upgrade to the latest version of LifterLMS.
If you’ve upgraded PHP yourself it’s possible that you’ve skipped a really important step: restarting your server. I’ve seen hosts forget this step as well!
Let me know if that helps,
