This paper investigates the event-triggered sliding mode control (SMC) problem using the reduced-order method for high-order systems subject to perturbation. To reduce the complexity of control design, a reduced-order approach is introduced by retaining the dominant mode of the system state. In addition, by injecting a power term, a new controller is constructed that aims to decrease the partial system control chattering. An event-triggered mechanism is designed by utilizing a time-varying trigger threshold; it is obvious that the proposed event-triggered strategy has fewer triggering times, larger triggering intervals between two neighboring events, and conserves system communication resources. Then, the existence of a positive lower bound on inter-event time is ensured to avoid the Zeno phenomenon. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is verified by magnetic control systems.