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Over the months and years of using Home Assistant, you likely use the Home Assistant Community Store like an untamed app store, installing custom integrations, themes, and front-end cards for every shiny new smart device or gimmick you test. This leads to your custom_components directory becoming a digital junk drawer filled with abandoned experimental cards, dead API scrapers, and integrations for devices you threw away years ago.
With HACS transitioning closer to an official curated marketplace experience within Home Assistant, it's time to stop treating custom stores like a Wild West sandbox. A bloated Home Assistant instance is a slow Home Assistant instance, and now is the ideal time to run a ruthless audit and purge all of those forgotten integrations that are dragging down your smart home.
Performance and security are down the drain
You might be introducing vulnerabilities
Beyond performance, leaving unmanaged HACS components running unchecked also creates security risks. Abandoned custom components literally hurt your Home Assistant instance dramatically.
The first issue you might experience is event loop drag and database bloat. Every custom integration registers listeners, polls local APIs, or logs state changes into your SQLite/Postgre-SQL database. With all of these processes running, a forgotten integration that constantly throws timeout errors or polls a dead endpoint can create a lot of unnecessary background chatter. In turn, that can spike CPU utilization and bloat your recorder history.
These performance dips are also accompanied by security risks. Unlike official core integrations that get patched automatically with every major Home Assistant release, abandoned HACS custom components rely entirely on independent developers. This means if a repository goes unmaintained, it can break silently or introduce vulnerabilities.
Audit your HACS
You might not need everything you have
To clean up your Home Assistant Community Store app selection, start by auditing everything you have. The best way to sanitize your persistent instance is to start with your startup log itself. Dive into your Settings, then System, then Logs, and hunt for custom integration warnings, deprecation notices, and timeout errors. You might notice a range of applications that you've installed that you've completely forgotten about here. You can remove any unused entries via the HACS UI and be sure to delete leftover folders as well.
Next, you can audit custom_components. Open your file editor or Samba share, inspect the folders inside config/custom_components, and cross-reference every single one against devices you currently own and use. You might find you got rid of a device years ago but still have the HACS app for it. Again, remove any unused entries and be sure to delete the leftover folders.
Things to look out for are, of course, the testing graveyard. You might have a range of integrations installed for a weekend project, a specific smart bulb that you got rid of, or an API service you stopped paying for. You also might have some frontend redundancy: custom Lovelace cards rendered obsolete by native Home Assistant dashboard updates. For example, there are a range of core features that now natively support themes, which custom cards used to require. Lastly, you likely have orphaned repositories too, like components that throw persistent warnings in your logs during boot because the underlying third-party API changed its structure.
Once you've removed all of these things, restart your Home Assistant instance. As your boot times drop, you should also notice your overall performance improving.
HACS is changing for the better
A more mature marketplace is fundamental
There is a major marketplace shift when it comes to HACS, and the fact that it's growing up is fundamental to the mainstream ecosystem. For years, HACS lived in a precarious position as a custom integration residing inside the custom_components directory. This meant it relied on side-loaded hacks to function.
Moving HACS into a more official marketplace raises the bar for quality. As HACS moves towards official integration and tighter ecosystem alignment, the days of installing random scripts with zero oversight are essentially fading. You can be sure that when you download an application, it meets certain performance and security standards. You also get the benefit of frictionless catalog access because the new marketplace is native. Browsing and downloading catalog assets no longer requires strict mandates, linking a personal GitHub account, or navigating complex API tokens for standard items. Content is validated and pulled directly via optimized release assets, elevating the user experience closer to a more traditional polished app store.
Alongside this, it means that you can embrace native stability too. Previously, a single core update or loader modification could break HACS entirely, which would leave you stranded. By folding the installer logic into core, this ensures continuous unbroken compatibility with the underlying system architecture.
And with the store baked directly into the settings panel, users are encouraged to evaluate whether they actually need a custom component. Over recent years, Home Assistant Core has aggressively absorbed popular HACS integrations (such as local Tuya alternatives, advanced energy dashboards, and specific device controls) directly into official first-party releases. You might not need to pick up custom components at all.
Secure your performance
You also get peace of mind when it comes to security
A great smart home isn't measured by how many custom HACS badges you have installed, but instead by how fast, stable, and reliable your core automations run. Open up HACS today, clean out the digital dust, prune your forgotten integrations, and get your Home Assistant instance running like a well-oiled machine.