For your use case, no.
- Using PHP sessions – will not work on most hosts, and will make that data available only to the browser and the current PHP request. This severely limits the usefulness
- Using Cookies – will work everywhere but have the same issue that you can’t persist server side or track things
- Using transients – will work to a point, you’ll have a row in the options table for every visitor though, which is the crux of the issue. Transients also get garbage collected, and there’s a chance that every update you make will trigger a new options row and an old transient to be cleaned up
Fundamentally the approach of storing a collection of data in an individual unit is flawed, and collecting additional data such as clicks, and the details used, will cause more problems, and in most cases be completely ineffectual:
- There are legal complications due to privacy
- There are security complications as misspelling a password by 1 character reveals the users password in the logs
- Storing an IP and a username means that you’ve stored identifiable information, which means you have to worry about compliance with data protection laws such as the GPDR
- Most failed login attempts are from bots, so there won’t be any clicks, there may not even be a browser. They’ll open a direct request bypassing the login page straight to the handler and check the response for success. Bots don’t even check you’re running WordPress and fire both WP/Drupal/Joomla exploits and login attempts indiscriminately
- Failed login attempts can quick spiral out of control, with even small low traffic sites recieving spikes of hundreds or even thousands of attempts. If you’re storing each visitor in a single option or transient, that could be hundreds or thousands of additional table rows. You could be constructing for yourself a resource exhaustion exploit
So instead, I would suggest:
- tracking the minimal information possible, aka an IP and how many times it attempted, perhaps just a list of timestamps that you can count
- Either store it in a single option, with autoload set to false so it doesn’t slow down your site, or use a dedicated table