Router energy consumption has an impact on the lifetime of a wireless sensor network (WSN). Small sensor node uploading can be challenging after installation. To save energy or lower the total amount of data produced by the WSN, data gathering is used redundantly to reduce or fully eliminate data redundancy at individual nodes. Because of resource constraint, wireless sensor networks confront a significant problem in determining solutions to improve resource efficiency and accomplish effective load balancing. The graph-based cat salp swarm algorithm (Graph-CSSA) is presented in this research as a multi-stage routing strategy for wireless sensor networks (WSNs) with the purpose of prolonging network lifetime by uniformly distributing energy consumption among clusters. The proposed CSSA graph is utilized to determine the best hop. Multi-hop routing is enabled by group head (CH) selection and data forwarding implemented in two operations. After the cluster vertices are distributed, blocks are formed centrally in the aggregation phase, which is similar to low-energy adaptive clustering hierarchy (LEACH). Finally, simulations are done to evaluate the proposed routing method’s performance and compare it to other energy-aware routing approaches. Our findings show that the proposed technique efficiently reduces data volume while increasing the lifetime of WSNs.