Automatic facial expression recognition (FER) plays a crucial role in human-computer based applications such as psychiatric treatment, classroom assessment, surveillance systems, and many others. However, automatic FER is challenging in real-time environment. The traditional methods used handcrafted methods for FER but mostly failed to produce superior results in the wild environment. In this regard, a deep learning-based FER approach with minimal parameters is proposed, which gives better results for lab-controlled and wild datasets. The method uses features boosting module with skip connections which help to focus on expression-specific features. The proposed approach is applied to FER-2013 (wild dataset), JAFFE (lab-controlled), and CK+ (lab-controlled) datasets which achieve accuracy of 70.21%, 96.16%, and 96.52%. The observed experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the other related research concerning accuracy and time.