Energy is a major driver of human activity. Demand response is of the utmost importance to maintain the efficient and reliable operation of smart grid systems. The short-term load forecasting (STLF) method is particularly significant for electric fields in the trade of energy. This model has several applications to everyday operations of electric utilities, namely load switching, energygeneration planning, contract evaluation, energy purchasing, and infrastructure maintenance. A considerable number of STLF algorithms have introduced a tradeoff between convergence rate and forecast accuracy. This study presents a new wild horse optimization method with a deep learningbased STLF scheme (WHODL-STLFS) for SGs. The presented WHODL-STLFS technique was initially used for the design of a WHO algorithm for the optimal selection of features from the electricity data. In addition, attention-based long short-term memory (ALSTM) was exploited for learning the energy consumption behaviors to forecast the load. Finally, an artificial algae optimization (AAO) algorithm was applied as the hyperparameter optimizer of the ALSTM model. The experimental validation process was carried out on an FE grid and a Dayton grid and the obtained results indicated that the WHODL-STLFS technique achieved accurate load-prediction performance in SGs.