This paper proposes a novel hybridization of two metaheuristic algorithms to solve the real-parameter single objective numerical optimization problems. The proposed Three-stage Cyclic Hybrid SFS and L-SHADE (3-sCHSL) algorithm integrates the high-level interactions of Stochastic Fractal Search (SFS) and L-SHADE algorithms in a single framework. Furthermore, a guided control population initialization strategy is injected in 3-sCHSL to address the stagnation and diversity loss issues as the evolution process evolves. The performance of the proposed algorithm is tested under different complexity levels of different transformations of the CEC 2021 benchmark suite with dimension 20. The experimental results demonstrated the efficiency and competitiveness of the proposed algorithm against recent state-of-the-art algorithms. In addition, 3-sCHSL achieved a superior performance when evaluating two engineering design problems. Scopus