Disable Comments Globally

To entirely disable commenting across your whole website, follow these steps:

1. From your WordPress Dashboard, go to ‘Settings’.
2. Navigate to the ‘Discussion’ page.
3. Uncheck the box next to ‘Allow people to post comments on new articles’.
4. Save the changes to update your settings.

Disable Comments Globally But Enable On Specific Posts:

Continuing from the steps above:

5. Go to edit the specific post or page where you want to allow comments.
6. Scroll down until you see the ‘Discussion’ box and check ‘Allow Comments’.
   7a. If ‘Discussion’ box does not appear, click ‘Screen Options’ at the very top right corner of the page and ensure that the checkbox next to ‘Discussion’ is checked.
   7b. Then proceed as described in step 6.

Disable Comments For Specific Posts or Pages

If you want to stop receiving comments on some posts or certain pages but not others:

1. Navigate into edit mode for the post or page you want.
2. Under Discussion Settings, uncheck ‘Allow Comments’.
3. Remember to update or save changes afterwards.

Turn Off Future Comments on All Posts

1. From your dashboard navigation bar, select “All Posts”.
2. From the ‘Bulk Actions’ menu at the top, select ‘Edit’.
3. Set ‘Comments’ to ‘Do not allow’, and apply changes.

Please note that these settings will affect new posts. For old posts, you should use Bulk Edit feature from post list to disable comments.

To Moderate Comments:

If outright disabling comments isn’t right for your website or you’d prefer not to do this then WordPress provides robust tools for moderating comments before they’re published on your site, nullifying spam before it ever sees the light of day.

1. Moderating comments can also be done going to Dashboard-> Settings -> Discussion.
2. Check an option ‘Before a comment appears – Comment must be manually approved’.
3. This puts all comments into moderation queue where they must be manually approved by an administrator.

Using A Plugin to Disable Comments in WordPress

If you’re not comfortable using ShortCodes, or if your site has many pages/posts and you don’t want to manually review each one, a number of plugins are available for WordPress which will allow you to easily disable comment functionality site-wide:

• Disable Comments (1+ million active installations) enables administrators to globally disable comments on any type of post, attachment or independently on specific post types. More about this plugin on the WordPress community page.

It’s important to keep in mind that while disabling comments may help reduce spam, it may also discourage the interaction between you and your readers or customers.

In WordPress 5.7 and above the ‘Enable Comments’ box has changed quite a bit and you will find it under the “Status & visibility -> Discussions” section when editing an individual page/post.

You also have plugins such as Akismet that work wonderfully well in combating spam in the first place!