Save Site as Template in SharePoint Online

Notice anything missing from your Site Settings page recently? If you’re in a SharePoint site on Office 365, Microsoft has quietly (with a loud response from the blogosphere) removed the Save Site as Template option. Using this classic option, which places a WSP file in the site collection’s solution gallery, is supposed to provide an easy way for an end user to re-use the configuration of a site.

Microsoft, as far as I know at this time, has yet to officially deprecate this functionality from SharePoint Online. It is still intact with SharePoint 2013.

They are hiding this from you for various technical reasons in favor of more sustainable site templating practices. I could explain them all if it wasn’t mostly outside my wheelhouse… It has to do with SharePoint Apps, upgradability, etc. What matters at the moment for a site administrator is that there is currently no longer a user-accessible option to template a site, with or without content. Or is there?

Some posts are out there that describe adjusting or adding the SaveSiteAsTemplateEnabled property of the site to TRUE via PowerShell or SharePoint Designer. This appears to not be necessary except in the case of enabling SharePoint’s publishing feature(s).

I conducted a test today on a plain site based on an OOTB team site template as well as a plain site based on an OOTB project site template. The page for saving a site as a template still exists if you append the following:

/_layouts/15/savetmpl.aspx

to the URL of your site. Voila! Your familiar page appears.

Using this method, I was able to successfully generate and save a site template in the solution gallery from each of my sample sites.