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Home Assistant

The Ultimate 2026 Guide to Customize Your Home Assistant Sidebar

25/03/2026

Last updated on March 25, 2026

Your sidebar is the command center of your entire smart home. A well-organized interface lets you get to what you need, fast, making your whole experience smoother and more efficient. If you’re looking for the definitive guide to customize the Home Assistant sidebar in 2026, you’ve come to the right place. In this updated tutorial, I’ll show you not only how to rearrange the basic items but also how to take your UI configuration to the next level.

This method is the standard for modern versions of Home Assistant (including 2026.3) and gives you total control over your smart home’s main menu. Let’s ditch the clutter and make your Home Assistant interface work for you.

Reordering and Hiding Sidebar Items (The Easy Way)

The simplest way to start editing the Home Assistant menu is by using the built-in UI tool. This feature is perfect for quick adjustments, like changing the order of your dashboards or hiding the ones you don’t use often.

Follow these simple steps to declutter your sidebar:

  1. Click on your profile name, located in the bottom-left corner of the screen. This will take you to your user profile page.
  2. Find and select the option “Change the order and hide items from the sidebar“.
  3. The sidebar will instantly pop into edit mode. You’ll see the icons start to jiggle slightly.

Once in edit mode, you have two main options to configure your Home Assistant interface:

  • To hide items: Click the “X” icon next to any item you don’t want to see. Hidden items aren’t deleted; they’re just moved to a section at the bottom called “Hidden,” where you can restore them anytime by clicking the “+” icon. Personally, I always hide the “Media Browser” and “Map” since I rarely use them day-to-day.
  • To reorder the sidebar: Simply click and drag any item up or down to place it in your desired position. Pro-tip: Move the dashboards you use most to the very top for lightning-fast access.

When you’re happy with your new layout, don’t forget to click the “DONE” button at the top of the sidebar to save your changes.

Advanced Customization: Adding Views and External Links

If the basic editor isn’t enough, you can take customization a step further. While you can’t add individual entities or devices directly to the sidebar, you *can* create shortcuts to custom dashboards or even external websites.

How to Add a New Dashboard to the Sidebar

The best way to group related devices or sensors is by creating a new dashboard. For example, you could have one dashboard dedicated to energy monitoring, another for security, and a third for your garden.

  1. Navigate to Settings > Dashboards.
  2. Click the “Add Dashboard” button.
  3. Give it a Title (e.g., “Security”) and, optionally, assign it an Icon from the Material Design Icons library (e.g., mdi:shield-home).
  4. Make sure the “Show in sidebar” toggle is enabled.
  5. That’s it! The new dashboard will appear in your sidebar. Now you can click into it and start adding your security-related cards.

How to Add a Web Link to the Sidebar

Want a quick link to your router’s admin page, a service like Grafana, or your favorite smart home blog? You can do this using the panel_iframe integration. This requires editing your configuration.yaml file.

Add the following code to your configuration.yaml. If you’re not familiar with this language, I highly recommend reading our beginner’s guide to YAML.

panel_iframe:
  router:
    title: "My Router"
    url: "http://192.168.1.1"
    icon: "mdi:router-wireless"
    require_admin: true

In this example:

  • router: This is the unique ID. You can change it to whatever you want.
  • title: The name that will appear in the sidebar.
  • url: The web address of the page.
  • icon: The icon that will be displayed.
  • require_admin: If set to true, only administrators will be able to see this item.

After saving the file, remember to go to Developer Tools > YAML and click “Check Configuration” and then “Restart“. A simple YAML reload won’t cut it for this integration; a full restart is required.

Sidebar Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Can I add a single entity or device directly to the sidebar?

Not directly. The sidebar is designed to link to full dashboards or views. The best workaround is to create a new, dedicated dashboard as explained above, and then add a single card to it that shows only that specific entity or device.

I hid an item by mistake. How do I get it back?

No problem. Just go back into the sidebar’s edit mode (from your user profile). At the bottom, you’ll see a “Hidden” section with all the items you’ve removed. Simply click the “+” icon next to the one you want to restore, and it will pop back into the main list.

Why do some sidebar items appear after I install an Add-on?

Home Assistant has a modular architecture. When you install certain Add-ons (formerly known as Apps), like Zigbee2MQTT, Node-RED, or ESPHome, they can add their own web UI as a new item in your sidebar for easy access. These items can be reordered and hidden just like any other.

Is it possible to change the icons for core items like ‘History’ or ‘Logbook’?

Nope. The icons for the core, built-in elements of Home Assistant cannot be modified through the user interface. You can only customize the icons for the new dashboards that you create yourself.