I have the following inside my SharePoint online and SharePoint on-premises.

1. Inside the source on-premises, i have a team site collection named PM.
2. Where i enable the publishing features on the site collection and site level.
3. Under PM site collection i created a new team sub-site named “Projects”, where i kept the publishing site feature disabled.
4. Then under the “Projects” team sub-site, i created a sub-site named “Test” of type team site and i created many custom lists inside it. then i save the Test sub-site as template
5. Then under the “Projects” team site, i created many sub-sites based on the “Test” site template.
6. Now i migrated the “PM” the site collection using a third party tool to Office 365, where the PM and its sub-sites were migrated correctly.

But i have noted the on the migrated sub-sites, the “Save site as template” option will be missing inside the “Projects” sub-site and its sub-sites. while on the source on-premises’s sub-sites the “Save site as template” will be available for these sub-sites, since these sub-sites themselves do not have the Publishing site feature enable.

Now to eliminate the possibility that the migration tool caused this problem, I create a brand new site collection inside my office 365,with the exact structure as my on-premises PM, and seems in Office 365 we can not save a sub-site as template, if its parent root site have the Publishing features enable…

so can anyone adivce if there is a way to fix this problem? as i need to save the “Test” sub-site as template and create new sub-sites based on this template inside my sharepoint on-line sites.. so can anyone adivce on this please?

**side note i have already enabled custom scripting inside my Office 365. and if i create a new team site collection, and i do not enable the publishing features, then the save site as template option will be presented.

Thanks