For the speed control of direct current motor, a fractional complex‐order controller (FCOC) is proposed in this paper. The FCOC is an extension of the fractional‐order controller. It is known that fractional‐order controllers exhibit strong robustness to open‐loop gain variations. However, in actual situations, due to external interference, the phase angle and gain of the system may change at the same time. The FCOC proposed in this paper adds an additional parameter, which makes the system show strong robustness when the phase angle and gain change simultaneously. Existing methods for parameter tuning of FCOCs only consider the preset gain crossover frequency and the expected phase margin. This may not allow the system to exhibit good dynamic and stable performance. In this paper, based on the frequency domain analysis, the parameters of the FCOC are tuned by integrating the gain crossover frequency, cutoff frequency, phase margin, and amplitude margin. The optimal solution satisfying a set of constraint equations is obtained by optimization algorithm. Finally, the simulation results are compared with those of the fractional‐order controller and the integer‐order controller. At the same time, the robustness of the system under disturbance is analyzed. The results show that the complex fractional‐order control presented in this paper has better dynamic performance and robustness.