Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) consists of nodes with tiny sensors and transceivers for tracking, sensing, and data collecting in a variety of circumstances. Controlling sensor energy is vital, particularly in demanding situations because the sensors are battery-based technology. In order to maximize sensor node energy, combining routing and clustering techniques becomes a useful way. However, there are drawbacks in sensor node deployment, including high Energy Consumption (EC), packet loss, short network lifetime, etc. As a result, in order to improve WSN energy efficiency, this study presents the Energy-Efficient-Improved Ebola Optimization Search Technique using Simulated Annealing (EE-IEOST-SA) to choose the best Cluster Heads (CHs) for clustering and to perform routing. A number of criteria including EC and Packet Delivery Ratio (PDR) are used to assess the EE-IEOST-SA’s performance. Comparative analyses between EE-IEOST-SA and the conventional methods, such as Cross-layer-based Opportunistic Routing Protocol (CORP), and Cross-layer-based Energy-Efficient WSN (CL-EEWSN) are performed to determine the improved performance of EE-IEOST-SA. In that, EE-IEOST-SA utilized only 0.9% of energy for 100 rounds, which is more than the performance of the current methods.