In this article, we will elaborate most of the common situations of

Missing “Save Site As A template” in SharePoint

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Before we getting started, you should be aware of

Before you decide to activate the SharePoint Server Publishing feature or Community Site feature for a team site, you should first be aware of the following:

1. Once the publishing feature is activated the ‘Save site as a template‘ option will be unavailable below Site Action.
2. Deactivate publishing features will not show back the ‘Save site as a template‘ option.
3. You’ll not be able to ‘Save site as a template‘ by any means.
4. Any workaround on the internet to ‘Save site as a template‘ from Publishing Site or from a site that has ever had publishing features enabled is unsupported and often doesn’t work.

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The “Save Site as a Template” option is missing in the following situations

1. The publishing site can’t be saved as a template.
2. The enterprise wiki site can’t be saved as a template.
3. The team site with Publishing feature enabled can’t be saved as a template.
4. The team site with Community Site feature can’t be saved as a template.
5. The site that has ever had Publishing or Community Site features enabled can’t be saved as a template.
6. In SharePoint Online, if you disabled Custom Script capabilities in Admin Center, it will lead to missing  Save Site As Template option.
   • SharePoint Admin Center > Settings > Custom Script.

To enable the “Save Site As a Template”, you should enable the custom script by checking

• Allow users to run custom script on personal sites.
• Allow users to run custom script on self-service created sites

Note: Changes to the above settings might take up 24 hours to take effect!

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“Save Site as a template for Publishing Site” workarounds

There are a lot of articles that suggest enabling “Save site as a template” via PowerShell as a workaround for this issue!

Note: Any workaround on the internet to ‘Save site as a template‘ from Publishing Site or from a site that has ever had publishing features enabled is unsupported and often (99.9999999%) doesn’t work.

So let’s try one of the common workarounds to prove to you that it will not work!

Enable “Save Site as a template” via PowerShell 

• Set SaveSiteAsTemplateEnabled to true for your publishing site via PowerShell as the following:

$web = Get-SPWeb http://your_ site

$web.AllProperties["SaveSiteAsTemplateEnabled"] = "true"

$web.Update()

• Navigate to http://yoursite/_layouts/15/savetmpl.aspx 
• The ‘Save site as a template‘ page should be opened as shown below:

• Provide the file name and the template name then click on save.
• The template should be now saved properly!

• Now, try to create a new site from this template.

• It’ll start working on it. then it’ll fail with the below error message

Cannot complete this action. Please try again.

The supported workaround is

“Creating a site definition instead of the site template, then use this definition to create the new sites.”

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The best practice of “Saving Site As a Template” in SharePoint

Based on your requirements, you should first decide which site template you need to use.

• In case, you would like to use  save site as template option with publishing feature enabled, you should plan from beginning to do the following:
  • Create your team site.
  • Finalize all customization that you need on your site without enablingpublishing feature.
  • Save the site as a template and consider it as the Master template.
  • You can now create sites from this Master template as you need. at the same time, you can enable the publishing features on these sites that already created from the Master template.
  • In a case of you need to add more customization to your Master Template, you should create a new site that created from the Master Template then saves it again as a new Master Template version.
• Or as I mentioned before, you should create a site defination instead.

Note: if you already activated the publishing feature and you need to save site as a template, you should move manually your customization to a site that not  has ever had publishing feature enabled.

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Applies To

• SharePoint 2016.
• SharePoint 2013.
• SharePoint 2010.
• SharePoint 2007.
• SharePoint Online

See Also

Check all my related answers on SharePoint.StackExchange.