Widely adopted, distributor-based systems forward user requests to a balanced set of waiting servers in complete transparency to the users. The policy employed in forwarding requests from the front-end distributor to the backend servers plays an important role in the overall system performance. The locality-aware request distribution (LARD) scheme improves the system response time by having the requests serviced by the web servers that contain the data in their cache. In this paper, we propose a proactive request distribution (PRORD) to apply an intelligent proactive-distribution at the front-end and complementary pre-fetching at the back-end server nodes to acquire the data into their caches. The pre-fetching scheme fetches the web pages in advance into the memory based on a confidence value of the web page, which is predicted by the proactive distribution scheme. The proactive distribution depends on both online and offline analysis of the website log files, which capture user navigation patterns on the website. Designed to work with the prevailing web technologies, such as HTTP 1.1, our scheme aims to provide reduced response time to the users. Simulations carried out with traces derived from the log files of real web servers witness performance boost of 15-45% compared to the existing distribution policies