Coverage control is a fundamental and critical problem in many applications of wireless sensor networks. Aiming at the high dimensional optimization of sensor node deployment and the complexity of coverage area, a coverage optimization method based on cuckoo search algorithm with principal component analysis is proposed for wireless sensor network. Based on the standard cuckoo search (CS) algorithm, this algorithm adds the principal component analysis method to reduce the correlation between cuckoo individual position information and improve the exploration ability of the algorithm. Simulation results show that when the contribution rate is greater than 0.5, the PCA cuckoo search algorithm not only outperforms the standard CS algorithm in six benchmark test functions, but also can effectively improve the coverage area of nodes in wireless sensor network.