The Wuppertal smearing is a technique that improves the overlap of an interpolating operator with the ground state of a given channel. We study how to implement optimal smearing parameters to isolate the ground state of several flavours of pseudoscalar and vector mesons at rest and with non-zero momentum, by tuning the smearing radius to minimize a functional built in terms of the overlap with the excited states. The smearing radius shows a monotonic increasing behaviour as a function of the reduced constituent masses of the valence quarks of the mesons. We provide parametric dependence of the optimal smearing parameters in terms of the quark masses, which will be helpful for future studies of meson phenomenology.