I tried everything everybody suggested and still I had ‘leave a reply” on my pages. Finally I happened to look at the theme specific options ( I was using Graphene theme). One of the options was to completely disable comments and override the word press defaults. Voila! my front page is now just a page with no comments, no space for replies etc. Do NOT try & change the .php code as sometimes suggested unless you really know what you are doing. I did & disabled my entire site. Fortunately bluehost keeps backups.
