As a novel evolutionary optimization method, extremal optimization (EO) has been successfully applied to a variety of combinatorial optimization problems. However, the applications of EO in continuous optimization problems are relatively rare. This paper proposes an improved real‐coded population‐based EO method (IRPEO) for continuous unconstrained optimization problems. The key operations of IRPEO include generation of real‐coded random initial population, evaluation of individual and population fitness, selection of bad elements according to power‐law probability distribution, generation of new population based on uniform random mutation, and updating the population by accepting the new population unconditionally. The experimental results on 10 benchmark test functions with the dimension N = 30 have shown that IRPEO is competitive or even better than the recently reported various genetic algorithm (GA) versions with different mutation operations in terms of simplicity, effectiveness, and efficiency. Furthermore, the superiority of IRPEO to other evolutionary algorithms such as original population‐based EO, particle swarm optimization (PSO), and the hybrid PSO‐EO is also demonstrated by the experimental results on some benchmark functions.