In the paper, the existence of soliton and periodic solutions is studied for the perturbed sine–cosine–Gordon equation. The corresponding traveling wave system is converted to a regularly Hamilton system via using bifurcation theory of differential equations and the geometric singular perturbation theory. Then by using Melnikov's method and symbolic computation, periodic wave solutions, solitary solutions, and kink and antikink solutions are obtained. The wave speed selection principles are given, respectively. Numerical simulations are performed to illustrate our theoretical analysis.