The formation and evolution of short-period contact binaries (CBs) are also open questions, and these systems are important to study the evolution of common convective envelope, investigate the mass transfer and discuss the final fate of binaries. In this paper, new light curve (LC) fitting and orbital period change analysis of nine CBs are presented. We found that these nine targets are shallow CBs, and GZ And is a totally eclipsing CB star. The asymmetric LCs of six targets can be explained by the starspot model. The O – C diagrams of six binaries show long-term variations, which can be explained by the mass transfer between two components or angular momentum loss in these systems. Meanwhile, the O – C diagrams of V582 Lyr, V1172 Her and V1207 Her show possible cyclic oscillations with a period of 12.88 yr, 15.45 yr and 4.60 yr, respectively, which can be interpreted as the results of the cyclic magnetic activity or the light travel time effect due to the presence of a third body. If they are triple systems, the mass of the tertiary companion is determined to be M3sin(i3) = 0.057 M⊙ for V582 Lyr, M3sin(i3) = 0.122 M⊙ for V1172 Her and M3sin(i3) = 0.074 M⊙ for V1207 Her. In addition, the Hertzsprung–Russell diagram shows that the secondary component of BF Tri and GZ And could be a pre-main sequence star and more than half of primary components of these systems have evolved with a position above the terminal-age main sequence.