In this paper, a new steel plate shear wall with a reduced web section beam is proposed. The proposed model, including a middle link beam with elongated circle opening, offers advantages such as the ease to integrate building services within the floor zone resulting in shallow structural depth, reducing demands on columns and beam-to-column connections, increasing the ductility by forming Vierendeel mechanism around the opening, and changing the pattern and mechanism of yielding. To investigate the structural performance of this system, experimental and numerical studies were carried out. Five 1/3- scale specimens were fabricated and tested under quasi-static cyclic loading. Results indicated that the steel plate shear wall with middle link beam (ML-SPSW) specimens had stable hysteresis curves and experienced 3% story drift without any reduction in bearing capacity. All proposed models could tolerate 6% drift with about a 30% reduction in maximum achieved load without a sudden or significant drop in strength or stiffness. The energy dissipation and ductility capacity were superior and the gravity bearing system (columns) and panel zones remained intact until the end of cyclic loading. Furthermore, nonlinear finite element (FE) models of tested specimens were developed and verified against the experimental results. Numerical simulations and test results showed good agreement. In order to further ascertain the validity of the proposed system, supplementary results were obtained from numerical models. Finally, a parametric study and a design algorithm were proposed to determine the proper size of the beam perforation.