Home Assistant Dashboard Customization: Your Ultimate 2026 Guide

Last updated on January 24, 2026

For years now, Home Assistant Dashboards have been the nerve center of any serious smart home. What many of us once knew as “Lovelace” has evolved into an incredibly powerful and customizable interface. But to truly master it and avoid a chaotic mess of switches and sensors, you absolutely need to understand how to manage its core components: entities and helpers.

In this definitive 2026 guide, I’m going to walk you through the essential techniques I’ve perfected as an IoT Engineer to keep my dashboards clean, efficient, and—most importantly—actually useful. We’ll cover everything from hiding entities to creating logical groups and transforming devices to behave exactly the way you want.

Entity Management: The Foundation of an Organized Dashboard

Every single device you add to Home Assistant creates one or more entities. A smart plug is an entity, its power sensor is another, and its firmware update status is a third… Without proper management, this list can quickly become overwhelming. This is where two critical tools come into play: Hiding and Disabling.

Hide vs. Disable Entities: What’s the Difference?

They might sound similar, but their functions are radically different, and it’s crucial to understand when to use each one. I’ve put together a table to lay out the differences and use cases clearly.

Characteristic	Hiding an Entity	Disabling an Entity
Primary Goal	Visual cleanup. The entity keeps working in the background.	Completely stops the entity. It won’t update or record data.
State & History	Continues to record its state and history.	Stops recording all data. Its last known state is frozen.
Use in Automations	Yes, it can be used as a trigger or condition.	No, the entity is inactive and cannot be used.
Typical Use Case	An individual smart bulb that’s part of a light group. You want to control the group, not the single bulb, but it still needs to function.	A sensor from a multi-function device you don’t care about (e.g., the humidity sensor on a motion sensor when you already have a dedicated hygrometer).

How to Hide Entities in Home Assistant (Step-by-Step)

To hide entities in Home Assistant and declutter your dashboards without losing functionality, the process is dead simple:

Navigate to Settings > Devices & Services.
Select the Entities tab at the top.
Find the entity you want to hide and click on it.
In the dialog box, click the gear icon (Settings) in the top-right corner.
Toggle on the “Hidden” option. That’s it! The entity will vanish from most UI views but will remain 100% operational.

[Screenshot from 2026 showing the option to hide an entity in the settings dialog.]

Grouping Entities: Simplify Your Controls

One of the most powerful features for organizing your smart home is the ability to create groups. Got a ceiling fan with three smart bulbs? Instead of three separate controls, you can create a single switch to manage them all at once. This is all possible thanks to Home Assistant Helpers.

How to Create Groups in Home Assistant via the UI

Gone are the days when this required editing YAML files. For years now, the process has been handled smoothly through the graphic interface:

Go to Settings > Devices & Services.
Click on the Helpers tab.
Click the blue + Create Helper button in the bottom-right corner.
From the list, select Group.
Choose the type of group you want to create (Light group, Switch group, Binary sensor group, etc.).
Give it a descriptive name (e.g., “Living Room Lights”) and select all the entities that will be part of the group.
Pro Tip! Check the “Hide members” box to automatically declutter your dashboard by hiding the individual entities.

[Screenshot from 2026 of the group creation wizard, showing member selection and the option to hide them.]

Advanced Example: Using a Group in an Automation

The real magic of groups is unlocked in automations. Imagine you want your “Movie Mode” scene to activate automatically when you turn on the living room lights after sunset. With the group we just created, the automation becomes trivial:

trigger:
  - platform: state
    entity_id: light.living_room_lights  # We use the group, not individual lights
    to: 'on'
condition:
  - condition: sun
    after: sunset
action:
  - service: scene.turn_on
    target:
      entity_id: scene.movie_mode
    data:
      transition: 2

As you can see, the trigger reacts to the group’s state, dramatically simplifying the logic.

`Switch as X`: Transform Your Smart Plugs

Technically, a smart plug is just a switch. But in the real world, that plug might be controlling a fan, a floor lamp, or even your Christmas tree lights. The `Switch as X` helper (or “Change device type of a switch”) allows us to make the Home Assistant representation match reality.

How to Use the `Switch as X` Helper (Step-by-Step)

To turn that generic “plug” into a “fan” on your dashboard, follow these steps:

Navigate to Settings > Devices & Services > Helpers.
Click + Create Helper and find Change device type of a switch in the list.
Select the switch (smart plug) you want to transform.
Choose the new type it will become: Light, Fan, Cover, etc.
Give the new entity a name. Home Assistant will create this new “virtual” entity and automatically hide the original switch for you.

Now, on your dashboard and when using voice assistants, you’ll see a proper fan control instead of a simple on/off toggle.

Best Practices for Home Assistant Dashboard Customization in 2026

With all these tools at your disposal, here are my final recommendations for effective Home Assistant dashboard customization to keep your setup clean and functional:

Use Views (Tabs): Don’t cram everything onto one screen. Create views by room (Living Room, Kitchen, Bedroom) or by function (Security, Energy, Media).
Hide Aggressively: If an entity only exists to support an automation or a group, hide it! A clean dashboard is a fast-to-use dashboard.
Leverage Groups Everywhere: Group anything and everything that makes sense to control together. It simplifies both your UI and your automations.
Use Specialized Cards: Explore the vast library of cards offered by Home Assistant and the community (HACS). Use Grid, Vertical Stack, and especially Conditional cards to show information only when it’s relevant (e.g., show the A/C controls only if the A/C is on). For next-level tweaking, Card Mod is still the king.
Less is More: The goal isn’t to display every possible data point, but rather the useful data points. Always ask yourself: “Do I really need to see this sensor on my main view?”

What About YAML? Is It Still Relevant in 2026?

This is a question I get all the time. The classic battle of YAML config vs. the UI in Home Assistant has shifted dramatically. Today, in 2026, I can confidently say that 95% of configuration tasks, including everything we’ve covered in this guide, can be done quickly and easily through the user interface.

However, YAML isn’t dead. It remains the language of ultimate power and flexibility for advanced users. If you want to create complex template sensors, reuse code blocks with anchors and aliases, or keep your entire configuration under a version control system like Git, YAML is your tool. For beginners, the UI is more than enough; for power users who want to squeeze every last drop of performance out of Home Assistant, mastering YAML is still a valuable skill.