Abstract: A total of 5 steel plate shear walls with slits were tested in this paper. The influence of slit rows was analyzed. The experimental results showed that this kind of specimen exhibited good ductility and energy dissipation ability. At elastic stage, the out-of-plane deformation was evident. With the increase of drift, the deformation of column between two slits failed as flexural-torsional buckling deformations. The failure position was focused at the bottom of the column between two slits or the bottom of a steel plate. The influence of slit rows was not evident. Based on the experimental results, it was found that the steel plate worked in-plane with better energy dissipation ability and ductility when the width-to-thickness ratio of a slit column was less than 15 and the height-to-width ratio was over 3.