The Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is a wireless network with no structure that monitors the system using an abundance of independent wireless sensors conditions, environmental and physical. On the other hand, the Network performance is still influenced by the routing issues, such as high message latency, frequent route interruptions, and irregular energy consumption. To solve this issue a novel Hippopotamus Optimized Self Secure based Rout(e)ing (HOPS-ROUTE) has been proposed for optimal routing in WSN for finding a secured optimal path. Optimization is the act of deciding the best inputs to get the highest or lowest output at the least possible cost. Hippopotamus Optimization can reach a much better spread of solutions and the faster routing convergence. The proposed approach has been carried out on the NS2 simulator. The proposed method's effectiveness is measured through performance indicators like packet delivery ratio, network delay, energy efficiency and throughput. The observational findings shows that the HOPS-ROUTE achieves an end-to-end delay of 1.5 sec, whereas existing CM-CSA, ISSA and DECR technique achieves 2.0s, 3.5s and 4.2s, respectively