Proportional Integral and Derivative (PID) controllers are widely employed to normalize the response of numerous DC motor-powered systems, such as electric locomotives, traction systems, etc. Specifically, this category of controller is ubiquitous due to their simplicity, ease of control, and low-cost. However, their design parameters need to be carefully tuned to enhance control performance. A novel LHHO-PID controller with a compound objective function that combine Integral of Time multiplied Squared Error (ITSE) with Zwee-Lee Gaing's (ZLG) time-domain performance criterion is presented in this current study to enhance the control performance of a DC motor system. The system's performance was assessed by analyzing its response across various dimensions, including frequency responses, convergence profile and time. The results demonstrated that the developed PID-based controller exhibited a commendable performance in regulating the DC motor speed as compared to other existing PID-based controllers in the domain. The time response analysis showed an improvement of 7.2 compared to the best performing controller in rise time, a settling time of 0.1204 seconds, zero overshoot and negligible steady state error. These findings indicate that the proposed LHHO-PID controller has the capacity to regulate the speed of a DC motor efficiently in a variety of industrial applications. © 2023 IEEE.