How to Build a Home Assistant Dashboard (Lovelace): Step-by-Step UK Guide

Home Assistant builds you a dashboard automatically the moment you add your first device, and for a lot of people that auto-generated view is genuinely fine. But once you’re past a handful of devices, the default dashboard turns into a long, unsorted list that doesn’t match how you actually think about your home. Building your own Lovelace dashboard - Lovelace is simply the name of Home Assistant’s dashboard system - lets you group things by room, hide what you don’t need day to day, and put the controls you actually use somewhere you’ll actually see them.

Before You Start

You’ll need Home Assistant already installed with at least a few devices added - if you haven’t got that far yet, our Home Assistant beginner’s guide covers initial setup. Everything below works entirely through the web interface on a phone, tablet or computer; no file editing or YAML required, though YAML mode exists later if you want it.

Step 1: Create a New Dashboard

1. Go to Settings → Dashboards
2. Click Add Dashboard, give it a name (e.g. “Home”) and an icon
3. Choose Start with an empty dashboard rather than a strategy dashboard - this gives you full control, though it means nothing shows up until you add it

Keeping your original auto-generated dashboard alongside your new one is worth doing while you’re learning - if you get stuck building a card, you can always find the same entity on the default view and copy its settings across.

Step 2: Add Views for Each Room or Area

A view is a tab within your dashboard - most people set one up per room (Living Room, Kitchen, Bedroom) plus an overview tab for the things you check most often (front door lock, thermostat, security cameras). Tap the + next to your existing tabs to add a new view, and give each one a name and icon.

Step 3: Add Your First Cards

Cards are the individual blocks that show a device, sensor, or group of controls. In edit mode, click Add Card and you’ll see a list of card types - these are the ones worth learning first:

Card Type	What It’s For
Entities	A simple list of devices/sensors with toggles - the workhorse card for most rooms
Tile	A single device shown large, with quick actions - good for the one thing you check constantly (front door lock, thermostat)
Glance	Compact icons showing status at a glance, no controls - good for a row of sensors
Thermostat	A dedicated climate control card with temperature dial
Picture Elements	Overlay controls on a floor plan image - more advanced, worth trying once you’re comfortable with the basics

Add an Entities card to your Living Room view, click into it, and add every light, plug and sensor physically in that room. Repeat per room. This alone - grouping by physical location instead of the default “everything in one list” - is the single biggest usability improvement most people make.

Step 4: Put the Overview Tab to Work

Your first tab should answer “is everything okay” at a glance without tapping into a room-specific view: door/window sensor states, whether the alarm is armed, current thermostat setting, and any active water leak alerts. A Glance card works well here since you’re checking status, not adjusting settings - if something needs attention, tap through to the relevant room view to act on it.

Step 5: Go Further With HACS Custom Cards (Optional)

The built-in card types cover most needs, but the Home Assistant Community Store (HACS) unlocks community-built cards that go further - Mushroom Cards for a cleaner, more modern look, and Bubble Card for pop-up controls that keep a busy dashboard visually simple. These aren’t required, but they’re the natural next step once you’re comfortable with the default card set and want a more polished result.

A Faster Alternative: Auto-Generated Area Dashboards

Building every room’s entities card by hand, as above, gives the most control, but there’s a shortcut worth knowing if you’ve already assigned your devices to areas under Settings → Areas (worth doing anyway, since it also improves voice assistant accuracy). Choosing the Areas dashboard strategy instead of “start with an empty dashboard” auto-generates a view per area, grouping every device already assigned to that area without manually adding cards one at a time. It’s genuinely faster to set up and updates itself automatically as you add new devices to an area later, at the cost of less fine control over card type and layout than building it manually - a reasonable trade to start with, especially for a household with a lot of rooms, with the option to convert individual views to manual editing later if a specific room needs a more tailored layout.

Common Mistakes to Avoid

• Putting everything on one view - a single dashboard tab with 40 entities is barely better than the default; grouping by room is what actually makes it usable
• Ignoring the “hide entities you don’t need” option - not every sensor needs to be on the dashboard; hiding diagnostic/battery-level entities keeps the useful controls visible
• Building it once and never revisiting - dashboards are worth adjusting every few months as your automations and devices change; what mattered on day one often isn’t what you actually check daily six months in

Troubleshooting a Card Showing “Unavailable”

• A single entity shows unavailable while everything else works - almost always the device itself has dropped offline (dead battery, Wi-Fi/Zigbee out of range) rather than a dashboard problem; check the device’s own entry under Settings → Devices for a “last updated” timestamp to confirm
• A whole room’s worth of entities go unavailable at once - points to a shared cause rather than individual devices: a Zigbee coordinator or Z-Wave stick losing connection, an integration needing a restart, or a network switch/access point covering that area going down
• An entity shows the wrong or stale value rather than unavailable - this is usually a polling-interval issue rather than a fault; some integrations only check in every few minutes, so a card can briefly lag reality after a physical change (a door opened, a light switched at the wall) until the next poll
• A card breaks entirely and shows a configuration error - almost always because the entity ID it references was renamed or removed; re-editing the card and re-selecting the entity from the current list fixes this faster than trying to diagnose the old reference

Frequently Asked Questions

Can I have a different dashboard on my phone vs a wall-mounted tablet?

Yes - you can create multiple dashboards and assign a specific one as the default for a specific device or user, which is exactly how most people run a simplified “overview only” dashboard on a wall tablet alongside a fuller one on their phone. See our wall-mounted tablet dashboard guide for the full setup.

Do I need to know YAML to build a good dashboard?

No - everything above works entirely through the visual editor. YAML mode exists as an option for anyone who wants more precise control or wants to copy someone else’s dashboard configuration from online, but it’s not required to build something genuinely useful.

Once your dashboard is built, pairing it with a genuinely useful automation is the next step - our first automation guide walks through building one from scratch in the UI editor.