Diabetes is a prevalent global disease that significantly diminishes the quality of life and can even lead to fatalities due to its complications. Early detection and treatment of diabetes are crucial for mitigating and averting associated risks. This study aims to facilitate the prompt and straightforward diagnosis of individuals at risk of diabetes. To achieve this objective, a dataset for early stage diabetes risk prediction from the University of California Irvine (UCI) database, widely utilized in the literature, was employed. A hybrid deep learning model comprising genetic algorithm, stacked autoencoder, and Softmax classifier was developed for classification on this dataset. The performance of this model, wherein both the model architecture and all hyperparameters were specifically optimized for the given problem, was compared with commonly used methods in the literature. These methods include K-nearest neighbor, decision tree, support vector machine, and convolutional neural network, utilizing tenfold cross-validation. The results obtained with the proposed method surpassed those obtained with other methods, with higher accuracy rates than previous studies utilizing the same dataset. Furthermore, based on the study’s findings, a web-based application was developed for early diabetes diagnosis.