Discussion

Another useful section that you can find inside the Document tab of the settings sidebar is Discussion. It is where you can set how you want to handle community interaction for the post you're currently working on.

There are two checkboxes available: one for allowing comments and the other for trackbacks and pingbacks. Both these checkboxes will probably be checked by default. You have to uncheck them if you want to turn off the comments or trackbacks and pingbacks for the post:

If you uncheck the Allow Comments box, visitors will not be able to comment on that given blog post. If you uncheck the Allow Pingbacks & Trackbacks box, something a bit more complicated happens, and you won't see its effect right away. With that box unchecked, when other people mention and link to your blog post from their own websites, your blog won't recognize that fact. If the box stays checked, other people's pingbacks (mentions) will show up under your post along with the other comments.

If you want either or both of these boxes to be unchecked by default, go to Settings, and then Discussion from the main left sidebar of the WordPress dashboard. You can uncheck either, or both, of the boxes labeled allow link notifications from other blogs (pingbacks and trackbacks) on new articles and allow people to post comments on new articles.

If you want to learn more about trackbacks and pingbacks, you can go to the codex at https://codex.wordpress.org/Introduction_to_Blogging#Trackbacks and https://codex.wordpress.org/Introduction_to_Blogging#Pingbacks.